Delta Lake for Rust Hacking: Stability, Deadlocks, and API Freezes (Jan 20, 2026)

Join the team for a candid technical discussion on the challenges of maintaining delta-rs and Delta Kernel. This session focuses on the "engineering reality" of building on top of rapidly evolving dependencies like DataFusion and the steps being taken to ensure the ecosystem remains stable for production use. Robert Pack and R. Tyler Croy discuss the path toward the 0.3.1 release, tackling critical deadlocks, and the necessity of an upcoming API freeze to allow for proper testing and bug fixes. 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs 0:00 Introduction and setting the context of working on Delta Kernel 0:39 Discussion of a critical deadlock issue in Delta Kernel 1:05 Description of the challenges caused by rapid API changes 3:01 Announcement of a freeze on breaking changes for one month after the 0.3.1 release 4:02 Update on increasing test coverage 11:26 Discussion on the need for better consistency in expression translations 22:46 Improved handling of Change Data Capture (CDC) scenarios 32:10 Focus on better session management in DataFusion 52:05 A final check to ensure the deadlock issue has been fixed