Review: RustWeek 2025

Written on 2025-05-17 in 1079 words ✍️.
Part of work reflection community rustlang

Motivation

My company was generous and sent me to RustWeek 2025 organized by RustNL in Utrecht, Netherlands. RustWeek is a conference for rust developers and especially many core contributors can be found there. So this was a nice opportunity to get some educational input for the programming language. I visited the conference together with a work colleague.

Travelling

We left Vienna by night train towards Amersfoort on Sunday. Arriving late on Monday, we went to our hotel. Unpacking our stuff, we got our conference badges, headed for lunch, and started our day of work very late. Getting the first impressions of Utrecht, I concluded this is a very nice place for me. The people are nice and expectedly I love the bicycling infrastructure. The canal Merwedekanaal benoorden de Lek gave me sea-style vibes (sure, as Austrian my understanding of seas is very limited).

The picture shows a scene from the Netherlands in the afternoon with a windmill in the center

Figure 1. The Netherlands are famous for their windmills

A street in Utrecht where pedestrians can walk on the left and right side of the street on a pavement and cars are parked next it it. The center allows cars to pass through the street and many trees make the street very green

Figure 2. A common street situation in Utrecht (pavement made of bricks and many green trees)

Conference venue

The conference took place at Kinepolis Jaarbeurs (cinema of the conference center). Mara turned this into a wonderful experience by subtly replacing the cinema promotional posters by rust-tailored ones. Splendid!

Several rust-themed cinema posters referring to well-known movies like Indiana Jones but calling it "Raiders of the Lost Arc<_>" instead

Figure 3. Subtile rust cinema posters

Even though the conference essentially took place the entire week, we only had tickets for the two conference days with talks.

Figure 4. My conference badge

Conference

On 2025-05-13, the talks started. The intro was very popular. It showed a giant ferris orbitting the earth with the final title “RustWeek” in the style of the Universal Studios intro. They mentioned it took them three days to create it including one day for rendering. Its duration is less than 30 seconds, if I remember correctly.

A photo of the RustWeek intro showing a giant ferris in front of Earth

Figure 5. Rendered intro

There were some very interesting talks for me and I am not finished with watching all recordings yet. But I am going to lose some words about the following talks:

Alex Crichton on the question “10 Years of Rust: Why?” gave a really suitable keynote for the event. He gave a rationale for the steps taken and tried to analyze what was necessary to reach 10 years of developing the language.
Due to my personal interest in digital typesetting, I am very grateful to Raph Levien and his work. Raph spoke about “Faster, easier 2D vector rendering” and spoke about one algorithm to improve rendering of fonts. He tried to reason about the use of GPUs for font rendering and explained which rust crates come into play.
I once wrote a blog article about icu4x 1.0 when I started using it. I am using icu4x in the opstr project. Shane spoke about Beyond ICU4X 2.0 and future goals. I promised him to provide a review of icu4x 2.0 as well. Stay tuned at this blog!

There are so many more talks to talk about. And simultaneously it is important to talk to the people. So many nice people with aspirations and dreams for the programming language. And I did not mention how much I enjoyed to resolve some rust issues in my head during the conference. A lot of kudos to my work colleague who is following core development efforts and helped me out several times. By the way, I have identified 4 Austrians in total at the conference.

On the day after the talks, rust 1.87 was released live from Utrecht. As I mentioned, we only participated on the two days and I left by night train towards Linz on Thursday evening.

the picture shows a conference venue hall filled with about 80 people chatting to each other

Figure 6. Conference venue hall

RustWeek organizers gathered at the front stage in a cinema room to take a final conference photo together

Figure 7. Final photo by the RustWeek organizers

Conclusion

I absolutely enjoyed Utrecht. I absolutely enjoyed the conference. I was astonished how well-organized the conference was by the RustNL community. So I want to thank them a lot and hope for a wonderful conference for them in 2026 as well!