21st BcnRust Meetup

We’re thrilled to announce the next edition of the BcnRust Meetup, this time hosted by Protofy!

Join us for an evening exploring two very different but equally ambitious Rust projects: an AI-native virtual machine that rethinks how code is executed, and a distributed task queue built as a hands-on journey into async Rust, concurrency, and fault-tolerant systems. Whether you're interested in language runtimes, AI agents, distributed systems, or simply seeing how Rust enables bold ideas, this meetup is for you.

Driver: An Agentic VM in Rust by Cristian Sánchez
Most virtual machines are deterministic by design. LLMs break that. But what if AI wasn't an external API on top, but a native execution primitive inside the VM itself?

Driver is a Rust VM where AI is a first-class execution primitive. The stdlib is aware of whether it's being invoked by deterministic bytecode or by an LLM-generated action and behaves accordingly.

We'll cover the practical decisions behind the core VM, and the toolkit around it.

Aether: Learning Async Rust by building a Distributed Task Queue by Arnau Berenguer
Building a distributed system is a great way to learn async Rust because you run into all the hard parts for real. In this talk I'll walk through Aether, a personal project of a task queue that lets you submit and run Python scripts on a cluster from a CLI. We'll cover the system architecture, how to handle multiple concurrent tasks sharing state, how to handle loss of connection, and propagating cancellation signals on concurrent tasks over the network. Along the way we'll see the honest lessons learned and what makes async Rust hard but fun.

Why Attend?

• Explore advanced Rust applications, from AI-native runtimes to distributed infrastructure.
• Learn practical lessons about virtual machine design, async programming, concurrency, and fault tolerance.
• Discover how experienced Rust developers approach complex systems and architectural trade-offs.
• Connect with Barcelona's Rust community and exchange ideas with fellow engineers, makers, and enthusiasts.
• Get inspired by real-world projects that push Rust beyond the usual web services and CLI tools.

Whether you're a Rust beginner curious about what's possible, or a seasoned developer looking to dive deeper into systems programming, you'll leave with new ideas, technical insights, and plenty to discuss.

Let’s build, learn, and geek out over Rust together! 🦀

Streaming: We will stream it via YouTube so you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified when we go live.