We're proud to share that Ada Hieta from Softlandia will be speaking at RustConf 2026 in Montreal, Canada.

"Rust for ML Infrastructure: A Case Study in Building an ONNX Runtime"
Thursday, September 10 — 11:50–12:30 PM EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

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What does it take to build a machine learning inference engine in Rust — and what does that experience reveal about Rust as a language for ML infrastructure?

This talk presents lessons learned from designing and implementing a GPU-accelerated ONNX runtime in Rust. The project, Onyxia, parses ONNX graphs, compiles them through a multi-pass pipeline, generates WGSL compute shaders, and executes them via wgpu across desktop, mobile, and the web.

The session focuses on how Rust's language, tooling, and ecosystem made the project possible. A friendly compiler and a strong type system make working with graphs a joy. Tests and documentation colocated with the code make it easy to understand the internals of the crates. Together, these properties make it possible to build a runtime that is both efficient and understandable.

The talk also reflects on Rust's growing adoption in machine learning infrastructure and the ecosystem crates that make such projects practical today.

About Ada

Ada is an Applied AI Engineer and Rust expert at Softlandia, with over a decade of experience across IoT, cloud systems, and software architecture. She has worked on multiple ML projects, including LLMs, imaging, and optical metrology. As an active member of the Rust community, she spoke at EuroRust 2025 on building a local AI chatbot using async Rust. RustConf 2026 is her next stop.

About RustConf

The Rust programming language is built by a thriving global community of open source maintainers, programmers, and enthusiasts working across a vast array of industries and domains. Rustaceans – and their ideas – are making Rust a powerful tool for a changing technological landscape.

Since 2016, Rustaceans have gathered each year at RustConf: the community’s premier annual conference dedicated to discussions and content about the Rust programming language and the open source software ecosystem.

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See you RustConf!

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