Given the influx of newcomers from the 0.7 release, I thought it'd be a good idea to summarize the condition of Rust, its libraries, and its documentation. bstrie said it best I think, "basically, any question of the form 'is there a reason for this stupid and terrible thing' is 'no, sorry, we're working on it' ".

Iterators

External iterators are a main feature of the 0.7 release, and there is ongoing work to remove all of the library features that use internal iterators. Most of them are gone, and there are few uses of internal iterators. However, they are clunky to use. The for loop semantics are going to change from internal iteration to external iteration, but they are still internal iteration right now, which means the advance adaptor is necessary for most uses of iterators. Additionally, the iter() helper function is necessary to actually return an iterator. This will be obviated by an Iterable trait that many things will hopefully implement. Due to 5898, many methods are oddly named or have an underscore appended (ie, transform instead of map, position_ instead of position).

IO

IO has been a bit of a losing proposition since at least 0.2. The interface is very primitive and inefficient. It requires using @Trait objects (@Reader / @Writer). It's also very undocumented. But the situation isn't going to improve much because all of that code is getting torn out when brson/the interns finish their work on the new runtime. On the plus side, we'll have shiny new IO when they're done! If you want to contribute, there's plenty of work to be done in this area:

Compiler

The compiler is still buggy and inefficient. Lots of things work, but lots of things don't. There's still some resolve bugs (the one mentioned above, as well as some others, and perpetually poor error messages), default methods don't work, debuginfo is incomplete, the compiler has quadratic codegen when using match, so on and so forth. There's a lot of work to be done here but it's not easy. I'm writing a series about the compiler that should help new contributors get started and grok how it all fits together. The only thing making Rust usable right now is LLVM's fantastic optimization. Our no-opt builds run slower than our opt builds under Valgrind. Ponder that for a minute.

rustpkg

rustpkg is still heavily in-progress and unfinished. It's usable, but not everything is implemented, and the documentation is incomplete. It's rather unintuitive to use right now, but it does work! Read the manual carefully if you want to use it.

Documentation

Documentation is poor. rustdoc is really bad, which doesn't help. I'm working on a new rustdoc (I log my progress here), but it won't be ready for some weeks. Lots of things are undocumented or near impossible to find because of how bad rustdoc is. The tutorials need lots of work, and a guided tour of the libraries would be nice, as well as a "Rust By Example," showing how to accomplish common goals. These aren't really hard to do, it's just that nobody has done them yet.

Libraries

There are few robust libraries or bindings to libraries, for anything, besides what is in std/extra. There's the stuff servo uses (glfw, skia, sdl), and an opengl binding somewhere, but beyond that, you're on your own. The rust-bindgen tool can help with wrapping a C library. There is no GUI library available yet, no real networking. It's easy to wrap a C library, you just need to be careful with your unsafe blocks. Once again, these things aren't hard, they just haven't been done yet.

The future

Basically everything is heavily WIP, but it's constantly improving. We always need more contributors, ask in IRC if you're interested. Rust 0.7 is pre-alpha quality, IMO. It would be silly to use Rust for something important, but don't let that stop you from trying to do something ambitious. If you feel Rust is still too young to get involved, but you want to track its progress, I write This Week in Rust, which is an easy way to track our progress. 1.0 is tentatively planned for first-quarter 2014, last I heard, and I don't think that is out of reach. 1.0 corresponds to "maturity #2" at the absolute minimum (the maturiy levels are listed as milestones).

But don't be discouraged. It was far worse before! Rust is in a good position, it's just not quite all there yet. This post may seem pessimistic, but the progress Rust has made is astonishing. Here's to a wonderful 0.8!

Some links