RustWeek 2025

After the good time at EuroRust 2024 it was a no brainer to go to EuroRust 2025 in Utrecht. Especially as I have a very soft spot in my heart for Utrecht. As a student I attended the Haskell summer school at the university there and since then, I absolutely adore that place. It's like the shire of LOTR, but as a city.

I won't bore you with the usual chaos of the German train system. Suffice to say, the calm coding in an ICE seat I usually look forward to, didn't really happen. Eventually I arrived the evening before the conference.

The only possible start of a conference is, of course, a visit to the well equipped sticker table. Visiting that one again and again was a good habit, as good ones kept showing up. I was a bit early so I just browsed the booths in the exhibition area and started to chat with various people. It was a wide range of projects and companies and I learned about many interesting places where Rust is used. In fact, the chats were so good that I missed the opening. But I made to the first talk on POLDERS, a game that tricks you into building a historical Dutch city, made with the Bevy engine. Jos made the talk very entertaining. Make sure to watch the recording if you can.

Being a keyboard nerd, the next highlight was Gu Haobo's talk Put Rust in your keyboard. As the name gives away, it was about a Rust firmware for keyboards, very impressive work. I can recommend all the GOSIM talks. Really good to see such an initiative.

Around noon I missed some talks because I run into Orhun whom I know from working on Ratatui and Ratzilla. The makers of the great Rust in production podcast joined our circle and we had a good discussion about things.

After lots of socializing it was time for talks again. Having deep interest in dev tooling there was no way I would miss David Barsky and Lukas Wirth talking about the big improvements in the rust-analyzer. Again, very impressive work. Bringing Rust to .NET by Michal Kostrubiec showed interop between the two ecosystems. Definitely something I want to try out. Josh Matthews showed the state of Servo - an embeddable web rendering engine which originated at Mozilla. After some troubled years, I'm very happy that this free, memory save web engine is picking up traction.

The day ended with more socializing, meeting old and new faces and a chilled bike ride through the city.

Day 2 had a whole track dedicated to the Rust project itself, from the compiler over cargo, dependency resolution, language specification and the type system to semver and the Rust Vision Doc. It was a perfect round trip and it was great organizational foresight to keep all these talks together in one track in one room.

The very first Ratatui meetup took place in the evening with users from all places and backgrounds. We started with some discussions outside the venue, then went for food and later for drinks. As much as I enjoy the talks, the best conferences are so good because of the people interaction. And RustWeek was amazing in that regard. Kudos to the organizers for this wonderful event.

I really regret that I couldn't stay the whole week. At least the train back on Thursday morning was on time and I could finally do some train coding :)