RustWeek & Rust Project All-Hands 2025 Trip Report

Several folks from Microsoft attended this year’s RustWeek in Utrecht, Netherlands.

RustWeek was both a conference for the Rust programming-language community and the first Rust Project All-Hands since 2019. The event was well attended by users of the language and many project core contributors. The week included two days of talks, one day of workshops, a hackathon, and social activities all week.

Opening banner

MS Attendees

DevDiv Rust Team

Microsoft Rustaceans

The Numbers

Day(s) Event Attendance
Tuesday / Wednesday Conference 840 attendees
Thursday Rust 🥳 10‑Year Celebration 350 attendees
  Workshops ??? students
Thursday – Saturday All‑Hands 153 people (Rust Project members & leads, invited WG21 C++ friends)
  UnConf (same building, same time) 100 + people

The Conference

The week started with the conference itself, which gathered over 800 attendees from all over the world. The schedule was packed with short‑form and long‑form presentations, running in three parallel tracks each day. In some time‑slots it was hard to decide which room to go to.

Venue

Speaking of rooms, the venue for this conference was… a cinema multiplex 📽️
https://rustweek.org/kinepolis/

Microsoft & DevDiv teams Hall‑lobby selfie

This unusual “conference‑room” setup makes for a memorable viewing experience.

On the plus side, nobody complains about poor projector quality (I’m looking at you, speakers that love black‑background slides!) or yells that the code font is too small.

On the negative side, the cinema seats are way too comfortable—if you’ve travelled from far away and jet‑lag hits you hard in the afternoon 😅

The Rust 🍿 movie posters adorning the cinema walls were hilarious. Kudos to Mara!

Kinepolis multiplex

Here’s a PDF with all of them: RustWeek Cinema Posters.pdf if you want a laugh.

Keynote

Keynote stage

Rust‑team alumni Alex Crichton (Core, Cargo, Libs teams) delivered a poignant and insightful keynote, reminiscing about Rust’s beginnings (pre‑1.0), the great decisions made, the early experiments, and the emergent community he saw many years ago.

The Tracks

The conference schedule featured multiple parallel tracks to choose from:

Hallway Track

As always at conferences, we don’t just go for the sessions. The best track is actually the “hallway track” 🙂

Hallway chat

That’s where the magic happens: people from all corners of the world come together, meet, reconnect, and chat about their work, cool projects, and the tech news of the day.

For some of us Microsoft Rustaceans, it was the first time we’d seen each other outside of the dreaded Teams UI 🙃

Favorite Sessions

Here are our favorite picks from the fabulous conference program (look out for them when they come online on YouTube):

Expo

As usual, the conference offered sponsors and exhibitors a generous area for booths, demos, and audience interaction. Conference swag was filling backpacks quickly.

Expo floor Swag table

Organizers

The conference ran without any snags and everyone enjoyed themselves. Kudos to the organizers, volunteers, and speakers who made this event a success. Thank you, all!

Organizing team

10‑Year Celebration 🎂

10 Years of stable Rust! 🎉 Can you believe it?

Birthday cake

We gathered to celebrate this milestone:

Speakers lineup

Rust Project alumni and current team leaders took the stage to share Rust stories that shaped them. The event was emceed by our very own Nell Shamrell‑Harrington. It featured short talks by team members, alumni, and friends: Alex Crichton, Aria Desires (aka Gankra), Niko Matsakis, Guillaume Gomez (aka imperio), Jonas Boettiger (aka joboet), Alice Ryhl, Bec Rambul, Esteban Kuber.

Red‑button moment

Also, read this anniversary blog‑post from Graydon Hoare about the beginnings, the Rust journey, and project goals:
https://rustfoundation.org/media/10-years-of-stable-rust-an-infrastructure-story/

Boasting with confidence, we decided to launch v1.87 live on stage, during the party.

Here’s Pietro pushing the red button: (photo)

Spring‑sun venue

Two hours… many drinks & stories later and Bam! we had a release built and deployed 🚀

Workshops & UnConf

The RustWeek Unconference was an invite‑only event for Rust maintainers. The goal was to facilitate maintainers working together in person, fostering cross‑collaboration with other maintainer groups and with members of Rust project teams.

The unconference was for maintainers of:

Thursday Workshops

Rust Project All‑Hands

This was the first Rust Project All‑Hands since 2019. The invite‑only event gathered members of the Rust Project and invited guests, including some members of the C++ Committee (WG21) for the Rust/C++ interop study group.

Venue

https://rustweek.org/dus/

We were hosted at a wonderful venue, by one of Utrecht’s iconic canals. It had a great outdoor area for lunch and breaks and even sported a mini beach by the water. Yes, the Dutch spring weather was unusually nice, and the bold sun made us all look for safe shade by our laptops in the study‑group rooms 😎

Group photo outside

Study Groups

The following study groups were organized:

The All‑Hands lasted three days (Thursday–Saturday). In the main room, several one‑hour cross‑team sessions were held. Otherwise, each team or topic had its own room for collaboration, study, and presentations.

Sessions / Agenda

Room: C++ Interop

Room: Cargo

Room: Compiler

Room: Cross‑team

Room: Lang

Room: Libs

Room: Rustdoc

Room: WebAssembly

Microsoft Participation

Microsoft engineers participated in the following study groups, driving conversations on the topics listed above.

Study Group Participants
Rust/C++ Interop Victor Ciura
Compiler Wesley Wiser, Nell Shamrell‑Harrington
Cargo Arlo Siemsen
Cross‑team Eric Holk, Wesley Wiser, Nell Shamrell‑Harrington, Boqun Feng, Yosh Wuyts
WebAssembly Yosh Wuyts, Wesley Wiser

That’s a wrap!

We all agreed we shouldn’t wait another six years to do this again, so we hope to see each other soon.

Final wave

It’s a wrap! <All‑Hands> up.