Rustweek 2025: Impressions and Highlights

I recently had the pleasure of attending RustWeek 2025 in the charming city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. The conference was hosted in a unique venue: a cinema, which meant presentations were showcased on impressively large screens! Beyond the visuals, the catering was also a highlight, with a good variety of food available.

While RustWeek offered a full slate of events, I focused my attendance on the main conference days, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Conference Experience

The main track presentations were held in a spacious auditorium, providing a comfortable viewing experience. However, a minor hiccup arose with the Ecosystem track. The dedicated room unfortunately couldn’t accommodate the high level of interest, leading to some attendees, myself included, having to occasionally switch to main track talks we hadn’t initially planned for. Despite this, the overall atmosphere was vibrant and filled with enthusiasm for Rust.

Noteworthy Presentations

Here are a few presentations that particularly stood out to me:

1. Put Rust in Your Keyboard

• Speaker: Gu Haobo
• Key takeaway: An introduction to RMK, a modern keyboard firmware library written entirely in Rust. This project showcases Rust’s capability in the embedded space, offering a robust alternative for keyboard enthusiasts and developers.

2. An Incrementally Spicier rust-analyzer

• Speakers: David Barsky & Lukas Wirth
• Key takeaway: This presentation detailed recent advancements and improvements to rust-analyzer, the invaluable language server for Rust. It’s always exciting to see the tooling around Rust becoming even more powerful and efficient.

3. Fearless Single-Photon Detection: Leveraging Rust for Scientific Instruments

• Speaker: Fabian Beutel
• Key takeaway: A fascinating look into how PixelPhotonics employs embedded Rust in their cutting-edge scientific instruments, specifically single-photon detectors. This was a fantastic real-world example of Rust’s reliability and performance in demanding scientific applications.

4. Ariel OS - An Open Source Embedded Rust OS for Networked Multi-Core Microcontrollers

• Speaker: Emmanuel Baccelli & Koen Zandberg
• Key takeaway: An interesting development that builds on the shoulders of giants(Embassy) and makes Rust development for embedded systems easier and more efficient.

Conclusion

Overall, RustWeek 2025 was a valuable and enjoyable experience. The presentations I attended offered insightful glimpses into the evolving Rust ecosystem, from innovative firmware projects to critical tooling enhancements and its application in specialized scientific fields. Despite the minor logistical challenge with one of the tracks, the conference was a great opportunity to connect with the Rust community and learn about the latest developments. I’m already looking forward to what the future holds for Rust!