Rust Program Manager Updates
Kangrejos 2026
This is part two of the Rust PM conference report. A week after RustConf, I travelled to Las Palmas for Kangrejos — the Rust for Linux (RfL) conference. It has a completely different vibe.
Kangrejos is a small invite-only annual meetup for the Linux developers providing support for Rust in the kernel and it is deeply technical. In addition to the RfL folks, it is also attended by kernel engineers in general (e.g. Greg Kroah-Hartman), people using Rust to write Linux code (e.g. drivers, kernel modules) and also members of the Rust Project.
It’s also an unofficial kick-off to the annual string of Linux conferences: Kernel Recipes and LPC (Linux Plumbers Conference).
Kangrejos is really intense. We have a single meeting room booked for two days and we spend almost every waking hour together. The day is filled with presentations and afterwards, we all have dinner that runs until midnight or even beyond. To keep things manageable and maintain a space where people can still get to know and talk to everyone, there are typically around 30 people invited.
This time, Josh Triplett and I teamed up to talk about Project Goals. I did a quick overview of the programme and then went over the current Rust for Linux goals — why they’re needed and what is their current status. We also wanted to highlight the huge progress we made. Two years ago, we started with a single goal and now we have thirteen listed on the Rust for Linux roadmap — all of them of direct interest to the Linux work and most being actively worked on.
Kangrejos has a “no recordings” policy, but they invited Daroc Alden — a reporter from LWN, who wrote about the session. All the Kangrejos write-ups are listed on the LWN’s Conference Index page.
Josh then talked about in-progress language features that the Linux developers aren’t tracking as necessary, but that can nevertheless be really useful.
Some of my favourites are:
- View types: you can pass a mutable reference to a function, but it will only borrow specific fields
- Comptime: write code that will run during compilation — inspired by Zig’s eponymous feature
- Unforgettable types: can’t be dropped implicitly, you must drop them yourself
- macro fn: write macros in normal Rust instead of the special macro_rules! syntax
Check out Josh’s slides for more!
It was also a great opportunity to meet Jana Dönszelmann from the Compiler team. As is apparently her wont, Jana convinced me to download the rustc (Rust compiler) source and build it locally. I knew the process in theory, but there is something to actually doing with your own hands. I’m now considering making some small changes when I find time.
She also invited me to the Compiler Office Hours where compiler devs discuss what they’ve been working on as well as just hang out.
Less than a week later, this proved really useful. I was contacted by someone working on a Project goal, who needed to debug some CI issues they were unable to reproduce locally.
And I was able to point them in the right direction thanks to the kind folks at the office hours.
This may seem parsimonious, but a lot of the work us Rust Project Managers (my colleague Nurzhan Saken and I) do is to enable things like this to happen.
We attend team meetings, try to follow everything (within our ability) that’s happening within the Project, get familiar with all the surrounding processes and talk to people in person so they know they can reach out to us with pretty much anything and we’ll figure out a way to help.
Even though it’s physically and mentally demanding, I’m really glad I got to attend both RustConf and Kangrejos (though it would be nice if there was more time between them next time). I got to represent the Project and Foundation and helped reinforce that I am here and ready to help.
That’s it for now, I hope to be back soon with a deep dive into Project Goals.
