Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safe, concurrent, and fast. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Send me an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on Github. If you find any errors or omissions in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

What's cooking on master?

80 pull requests were merged in the last week.

Now you can follow breaking changes as they happen!

Breaking Changes

Implementations of Copy must now be declared explicitly. This is part of the opt-in-builtin traits RFC (colloquially knows as OIBIT) which is supposed to remove some potential footguns from the typesystem.
Most use of closures have been converted to 'unboxed closures', the new, more flexible, closure model. As a result of API changes some downstream code will break, the PR has detailed instructions for the transition.
Slight adjustments have been made to the fmt API to make them safe. These APIs are rarely used directly.
It's now impossible to explicitly call the call method of the closure types without turning on a feature gate. Futureproofing. Doesn't affect the normal calling syntax.
The Option and Result variants are no longer reexported from their respective modules. This won't break most code because the variants are part of the prelude.

Other Changes

Barosl taught bors how to do rollups!!!!!
Type bounds can be constrained by the type of an associated type, as in fn sum_uints<I>(iter: I) where I: Iterator, I::A = uint { ... }. RFC.
Lifetime elision works on unboxed closure type sugar.
The testing guide has been overhauled.
unsafe impl and unsafe trait have landed as port of OIBIT. This is required to convert Send and Sync into library types.
BTreeSet implements BitOr, BitAnd, BitXor, and Sub.
The recursion_limit attribute can control how deeply various algorithms in the compiler recurse. It can be used to convince the typechecker to keep working on particularly complicated types.
String implements FromIterator<&str> and Extend<&str>, which means that iterators of &str can be collected into or appended on to a single string, e.g. let s: String = vec!["foo", "bar"].into_iter().collect();, let s = String::new(); s.extend(vec!["foo", "bar"].into_iter());.
New os::unix and os::windows modules provide platform-specific interop with std::io.
The TupleN traits are deprecated because tuple indexing is part of the language.

New Contributors

Aaron Weiss
Aidan Cully
Arthur Liao
bluss
Jon Haddad
Matt Murphy
Matt Windsor
Maxime Quandalle
Nafis

Approved RFC's

None.

New RFC's

505: API comment conventions. Standardizing current conventions.
507: Release channels take 2. Describes the release train, feature staging and in this iteration merges stability attributes with feature gates.
509: Collections reform part 2. This RFC shores up the finer details of collections reform. In particular, where the previous RFC focused on general conventions and patterns, this RFC focuses on specific APIs. It also patches up any errors that were found during implementation of part 1. Some of these changes have already been implemented, and simply need to be ratified.
517: io and os reform. This RFC proposes a significant redesign of the std::io and std::os modules in preparation for API stabilization.
519: Panicking tasks should abort process if not handled.
520: Change array syntax to prevent ambiguity introduced by RFC 439. An alternative to [RFC 498]rfc498] that fixes the ambiguity by changing the array type syntax.
522: Allow the Self type to be used in impls. In the implemantion of a trait, instead of writing the explicit type for which a trait is implemented, just write Self.

Community

rustbyexample.com is an official rust-lang project now. Contributions highly encouraged. Reddit.

From the Team

Rust 1.0: Scheduling the Trains. About the 1.0 release schedule. Reddit. HN.
Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik are joining the Rust Core Team. Reddit. HN.
Weekly-meetings/2014-18-11: process changes; box patterns; macros; issues in FIXMEs; placement box. Reddit.

Blog Posts

Fun with Threads: Comparing basic parallel programming in C and Rust, from a beginner's perspective. Reddit
Rewriting Rust Serialization, Part 3: Introducing Serde: Part 3 of Erick's great series on serialization. Reddit
Using Rust to Make a Safer Interface for Yahoo’s Fast MDBM Database: Reddit
Bootstrapping Rust: A quick look at the issues of compiling a compiler written in itself. Reddit
A Beginner’s Thoughts on Programming Languages (Part 2 — RAII, GC, Ownership, noexcept): Reddit
Working with AI behavior trees: Using some of the AI features found in Piston. Reddit

24 Days of Rust continues!

New Projects

Elliptic Curve Crypto: Elliptic curve arithmetic and cryptography library in pure Rust
Rustache: a flexible template engine for Rust
checked_cast!: A small macro to deal with the libc typedef hell
Iota: A simple text editor written in Rust
Metafactory: value construction pipeline builder
superchan: A Rust crate containing types for sending data across a network
wxRust: A Rust binding of the wxWidgets cross platform toolkit

Project Updates

This Week in Servo 14. Servo has adopted hyper. Reddit.
Servo meeting notes from Mozlandia. Notes from the workweek.
Servo running on Firefox OS. Reddit.
rusty-tags now supports emacs

Upcoming Events

There will be a talk about Rust at PyCon.
12/18 Bay Area Rust: Crypto.

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