Rust 1.0 Enters Beta

An anonymous reader writes: Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety and speed and aims, among other things, to offer memory safety without garbage collection and threads without data races. Over on the Rust blog, the Rust Core Team has announced the release of Rust 1.0 beta. They write, 'The beta release marks a very significant "state transition" in the move towards 1.0. In particular, with the beta release, all libraries and language features that are planned to be stable for 1.0 have been marked as stable. As such, the beta release represents an accurate preview of what Rust 1.0 will include.' The final Rust 1.0 release is scheduled for May 15th, 2015. A warning from the developers: "Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry." The FAQ is worth reading.

Comments

Give the ecosystem a few days to catch up

[drewm19801927]

Now is a good time to play around with Rust and explore the language features! If you build against the beta release and don't add external package dependencies, your code will most likely continue to function for the duration of the 1.0 release cycle. However, now is probably a particularly ~bad time for new rust users to start a project and add a bunch of dependencies from Cargo/crates.io. Beta changed code dependencies on unstable features from warnings to errors, so a lot of common libraries in the ecosystem are broken at the moment, and will take a little while to get updated. Happy hacking!

Ada

[Elledan]

Is there any reason why anyone would want to use Rust when they're already proficient in both C++ and Ada?

You'd think that Ada is already covering most if not everything what Rust is trying to cover here, especially the memory safety and concurrency aspects.

Re:"without garbage collection"

[BasilBrush]

You must be a Java programmer. Garbage collection is generally a very bad idea for a systems language, because of the periodic stalls whilst it does the cleanup. Especially if it's shunting blocks around memory to defragment. It's one of the big reasons why Android underperforms iOS, why it's never been so smooth in operation. And the only thing a developer can do about it is switch to a different language or develop for a more powerful machine.

Memory fragmentation can be a problem - but the success of C and C++ in most domains over the decades has shown it's just one more aspect a programmer has to deal with, it's not a showstopper. It's fixable, on the same machine, with the same language.