Rust Brisbane • Mar 2026
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Talks
A C compiler, built in Rust: From source code to diagnostics
This talk will explore a compiler’s “front-end”, using my C compiler as an example. The concepts are relevant to all compilers, not just for C. We’ll walk through the steps from reading the C source code text file through to emitting nice, friendly diagnostics, covering topics like the lexer, parser, semantic analysis & type checking, and constant expression evaluation. Along the way we’ll look at various parts of my Rust implementation, and I’ll discuss some design choices and lessons I’ve learned. Afterwards you’ll have a new appreciation for everything that your compiler (whether it’s rustc, tsc, clang, gcc, msvc, or something else) does for you!
– By Neil Henderson
Zero-Shot NER in 100ms: Porting GLiNER2 to Rust with ONNX Runtime
Traditional named entity recognition locks you into predefined categories like “person” or “organization” — retrain every time your domain changes. GLiNER2 flips this: define custom entity types at inference time, no retraining required. The catch? The reference implementation is Python-only, which makes embedding it in production pipelines painful.
In this talk, I’ll walk through porting GLiNER2 to a pure Rust inference library — from exporting a multi-stage transformer pipeline to ONNX, to reimplementing tokenization, span generation, and schema-conditioned decoding in idiomatic Rust. We’ll dig into the architecture of the model itself (DeBERTa encoder, GRU count head, 4D span scoring tensors), the Rust-specific challenges (ndarray gymnastics, ONNX Runtime bindings, faithful floating-point reproduction), and the practical payoff: sub-100ms structured extraction on CPU with zero Python in the loop.
Whether you’re interested in how modern NLP models actually work under the hood, how to wrangle ONNX from Rust, or how zero-shot entity recognition can replace brittle regex pipelines in domains like legal, medical, and financial text analysis — there should be something here for you.
– By Chris Raethke
RSVP
RSVP will open the Tuesday 10th Mar, 9am AEST
Venue
- Room
- Community Meeting Room (Downstairs between the escalators)
- Doors open
- 5:00pm
- Talks start
- 5:30pm