Tomáš Šedovič: Project Update: "Bringing Rust into Python" | RustConf 2026

Greetings everyone. My name is Tomáš Šedovič. I am a program manager for the Rust project as well as a co-lead for the project goals team. Now, let's talk about Python and Rust. Uh, I'm assuming All right. Is that better? Yeah, sorry. Um, I'm assuming most of you know what Python is. It's a

very popular language. Um, quite um, quite sort of approachable and versatile. It's pretty much everywhere. And I'm going to be talking about languages within languages. It's kind of relevant here. Uh, it's an interpreted language that um, the interpreter is called CPython and as the name suggests, it's written in C. Uh, Python also has a comprehensive standard library which

is written in Python and C and also a very large module uh, ecosystem of modules um, which are written in Python, a lot of them in C, also other languages, kind of um, C++ Fortran for some math things and also uh, more and more increasingly Rust. So, why are we here? On the um,

on the 17th of November um, 2025, two members of the Python core team, Emma Smith and uh, Kirill Podoprigora uh, wrote a proposal in the Rust world. You can think of it as a pre-RFC of bringing Python uh, sorry, bringing Rust into the CPython project. And by that I mean not not necessarily only to the standard library but also into the interpreter itself. And some of the

reasons they mentioned were uh, memory and thread safety which is kind of a given pretty much. Um, the data structures that ship with Rust. Um, they also, I'm quoting from the proposal. I love this. Um, an excellent build system. They're talking about Cargo obviously. And also the fact that for new third-party modules that do ship native code, increasingly people are picking Rust to do that.