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Rust 1.6 Released (rust-lang.org)

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The Rust team has announced the release of version 1.6 of their programming language. The biggest new feature is that libcore — the Rust core library — is now stable. "Rust's standard library is two-tiered: there's a small core library, libcore, and the full standard library, libstd, that builds on top of it. libcore is completely platform agnostic, and requires only a handful of external symbols to be defined. Rust's libstd builds on top of libcore, adding support for memory allocation, I/O, and concurrency. Applications using Rust in the embedded space, as well as those writing operating systems, often eschew libstd, using only libcore." Other features worth noting: Crates.io disallows wildcards for dependencies, there are a ton of stabilized APIs, timer functions that use milliseconds have been deprecated, and the parser will warn you if a failure was caused by Unicode characters that look similar but are interpreted differently.

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Since when is stability a feature? Isn't stability a basic requirement for software, especially in a programming language?

    If it takes up to release 1.6 for things to become stable, I'm probably not interested.

    1. Re:WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If it takes up to release 1.6 for things to become stable...

      Libstd has been stable. This is equivalent to "libc" that C/C++ programmers are familiar with. This new "stability" is libcore, a minimal core library needed to compile. The GCC equivalent of this is the "low-level runtime library" (libgcc.a + libgcc_s.so.1).

      This is important because many popular Rust projects targeting embedded hardware and operating systems have appeared. For these applications libstd is not desirable, and to date they've been relying on an unstable core. Now they have a stable libcore to rely on.

      These changes just reflect the demands of Rust users as they pursue their interests. Thankfully Mozilla values these users and is supporting them. The platform is only a little over 8 months old.... reasonable expectations are necessary.

  2. Isn't there a quote/corollary about reinventing C? by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We need to update Murphy's Laws for the new millennium:

    * "Those that don't understand C are condemned to re-invent it, poorly."

    Almost applies to every C derivative: C++, Rust, Obj-C, etc. /me ducks :-)

    With apologies to Henry Spencer's "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."