Training a Language Model End-to-End in Rust: An Experience Report

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.25008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: I pretrained a language model end-to-end in Rust - alone, with no team, no PyTorch, and no Python in the training path - for $164 in rented GPU time. I report that as an achievement, not a recommendation: the more useful contribution is a measured failure taxonomy of the two leading Rust ML frameworks, Candle and Burn, as training (not inference) backends in 2026. I document five Candle defects, including fused kernels that silently produce no grad