Welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! This week saw the release of 0.8, the removal of @fn, and a bunch of other changes. The tutorial has been updated significantly, surrounding pointers and boxes, so you should re-read those sections if you're still feeling shaky on when you should use which.

What's cooking on master?

There were 79 PRs merged this week.

Breaking changes

• printf! and printfln! have been removed.
• continue is now a keyword, a synonym for loop, preceeding loop's removal (https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/9467)
• Item visibility is properly encoded in metadata, so code which used private items that may have worked before is now rejected.
• Char literals which should have been escaped are now rejected when they aren't escaped.
• impl Foo for T; is now disallowed. Use impl Foo for T {}.
• @fn has been removed from the language. Replace it with @Trait objects, if you really need @fn (you probably don't).
• start no longer takes a crate map.
• Some more keywords have been reserved: alignof, offsetof, and sizeof.

Everything else

• A ton of documentation work was put in this week. The box section of the tutorial has been rewritten, and there's a new rustpkg tutorial too. The module tutorial saw the file section extended. There was a bunch of module documentation updated/added too.
• rustdoc(_ng) also saw a lot of work. It completely replaced the old rustdoc, as well as seeing a lot of fixes. Huge thanks to Alex Crichton for all the work with it!
• std::vec has seen some nice changes to connect_vec and concat_vec (they were really awful before).
• rustpkg test is implemented.
• type_use has been removed. This did some nasty things and LLVM's mergefunc pass will do a better job of the same optimization (once it's enabled).
• with_c_str is now optimized to be allocation-free for short vectors.
• The logging system, when using the new formatting code (so debug2 etc) is allocation-free.
• std::rand has seen some cleanup, in preparation for its overhaul.

Weekly Meeting

The weekly meeting discussed a bunch of things, the main things of importance to me being:

• loop -> continue
• Allowing nested comments

Announcements

• wxRust - A binding to the wxWidgets toolkit.
• widmann - A Sinatra clone
• gl-rs has been updated to generate only bindings for a select version / set of extensions.
• Debugging Rust in Eclipse - Michael Woerister's final GSoC post. He did really great work this summer!
• Rust for Rubyists has been open sourced!
• The Claymore project has just come to my attention. Apparently it has been going on for quite some time. There are some screenshots at http://claymore-dev.blogspot.com/.
• rustenstein3d - a Wolfenstein3D engine
• clio, a roguelike. This one also slipped under my radar for a while.
• rust-gmp has been updated for 0.8/master.
• rustdoc_ng, being merged into mainline, has concluded as a project.
• And, of course, the 0.8 release discussion on reddit.