A developer describes their ambitious 2026 project to create Valen, a new programming language with seamless Rust interoperability, cross-language generics, and memory safety features, inspired by the historical Golden Spike that connected the transcontinental railroad.
In September 2026, NVIDIA announced native GPU programming support in Rust, enabling developers to write GPU kernels directly in Rust compiled to PTX. The move reflects Rust's growing adoption in AI systems infrastructure for its compile-time safety benefits. NVIDIA offers two programming models—SIMT and the newer Tile—with cuda-oxide providing a custom Rust compiler backend for kernel development.
A researcher experiments with integrating local LLMs into compiler pipelines to generate code optimizations, testing five benchmark programs to evaluate performance improvements, functional correctness, and optimal optimization stages. The work, presented as a poster at CppCon, explores whether small local LLMs can match or exceed traditional compiler optimizations like -O3, with results suggesting larger cloud models perform significantly better for LLVM IR optimization.