All Hands 2026 retrospective | Inside Rust Blog
July 31, 2026 · Nurzhan Saken<br>on behalf of the Program team
In May 2026, 166 Rustaceans gathered in Utrecht for the Rust All Hands. This event is an opportunity for the Rust Project members and invited guests to work on Rust in person for several days — discuss its future, resolve blockers, build connections between teams, and so on (but not make any final decisions!).
This was the second All Hands organized by RustNL, after the one last year revived the tradition after a six-year hiatus. It was part of RustWeek both times, with the Rust All Hands following directly after the conference days. And yes, the All Hands will happen again in 2027! More details on that at the end.
Also co-located with the All Hands was the RustWeek Unconference, where invited ecosystem maintainers and contributors collaborated with each other and with Rust Project members. This year, there were six participating groups: Bevy Engine, Ariel OS, Linebender, the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, Rust GPU, and Rust Embedded — with around 60 members in total.
Similarly to last year, the conference day right before the All Hands had a special track, the "Rust Project Track", with talks presented by Project members. (See the recordings.). The talks touched on some of the topics that the Rust teams discussed in greater depth in the All Hands sessions.
Sessions
At the All Hands, there were 73 sessions spread across 3 days and 11 rooms, most of which were pre-scheduled, though some happened spontaneously. You can find the session notes in rust-lang/all-hands-2026.
The State of the Rust teams session kicked off the All Hands and provided a (literal) platform for teams to tell everyone about their activities.
Many sessions focused on pressing topics in the Project's governance. The Leadership Council and Project Directors both held Q&A panels about their roles and processes, and how they relate to one another and the Rust Foundation. The moderation panel provided a safe space for Rust moderators to discuss the challenges they face, with support from Q (head moderator of Hachyderm)1. The Project culture discussion examined sources of disempowerment for maintainers and contributors, and ways to address them. The sessions on Project Goals, north stars, and funding looked at improving how the Project coordinates and communicates work2. Finally, there was a discussion about improving the RFC process, possibly by integrating some ideas from the TC39 process.
As expected, most of the sessions focused on the evolution of Rust itself. The teams discussed a wide variety of efforts, including const generics, const traits, field projections3 and reborrowing4 (1, 2, 3), in-place initialization, SIMD, allocators5, custom lints, stability attributes for libraries, rustc as a library6, the Sized Hierarchy, and auto traits. Beyond these, there were numerous sessions on compiler internals, codegen, semantics, specification, tooling, and infrastructure.
Interoperability was another prominent topic. Discussions covered the overall Rust/C++ interop problem and solution space7, the state of Rust/C++ interop using Crubit8, and safer interop via combining LLVM IR with Rust MIR. It was also great to see in-person collaboration between the Rust Project and both Rust for Linux9 and Rust for CPython, aimed at unblocking further integration of Rust into the Linux kernel and CPython.
Feedback
Overall, people loved the All Hands! Responders rated it 9.5/10 on average, and indicated they'd return next year if given the chance.
Here are some of the things they shared:
Got some very awesome conversations about effects with Jana Dönszelmann and later Tyler Mandry and Benno Lossin which have gotten me very excited and I'm writing blog posts as we speak.
I'm also full of ideas from the mods convo with Q, that I expect to bear fruit in subtle ways.
We may also have unblocked rustc_public, and are working with t-infra to be able to statically compile a rustc driver.
— Nadrieril
The week was full of good surprises! I was surprised at the significant interest in the things I'm working on, based on conversations and the attendance at the workshops (and the related talks).
I was happy to see we're covering most of the high priority interop issues people are concerned about. That was a really good outcome.
There are also a bunch of exciting things in the early stages of discussions or scoping work. Some might never happen, but if/when they are ready, I'm looking forward to sharing them.
— teor
For cargo-semver-checks, we decided on a path forward for building rustdoc JSON with correct features enabled, which is sufficient to unblock cross-crate analysis. We also agreed that it would be desirable to run it on PRs to the standard library, because accidental breakage happens there too and it's extremely painful to deal with. We have a clear path forward here too.
We also got to consensus that it would be good...