Focus on what matters
RustRoverBlazingly Fast or Blazingly Hyped? A Reality Check on Rewriting in Rust
This is a guest post by Mateusz Maćkowski and Marek Grzelak, co-maintainers of cot.rs and speakers at Rustikon 2026. You can watch the full talk here.
RIIR. If you’ve spent any time in open source communities, you’ve seen it. Someone opens an issue on a C or C++ project and suggests rewriting in Rust for memory safety and performance. Sometimes it’s a serious proposal. Sometimes it’s a meme. In 2026, it’s honestly a bit of both.
We wanted to find out which one it really is. Not in theory, but by looking at what actually happened when people did it. The wins, the performance numbers, the projects that were abandoned three years in, and the CVEs that showed up in freshly written Rust code. We’ve been in this ecosystem long enough to have seen all of it, and this blog post, based on our talk on Rustikon 2026, was our attempt to give it an honest look.
