Welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

What's cooking on master?

47 PRs were merged this week.

Breaking Changes

• Non-ASCII identifiers are feature gated, due to open questions about how it should be done. They aren't being removed, just deferred to post-1.0.
• Some more closure reform has gone through. ~fn has been removed, use proc instead. &fn is also short for this world.
• std::util::NonCopyable had its dummy constructor removed.
• All of the functions in rustrt have been prefixed with rust_.
• Items inside functions no longer accept privacy modifiers, since it is meaningless.
• Reachable extern fns are no longer marked internal.

Other changes

• A Gc<T> stub has been added. New code should use this instead of @T.
• .. is now the pattern to use when ignoring multiple elements in a pattern.
• Stepping through if in a debugger should be much smoother now.
• rustpkg -O will now actually optimize the package it is building.
• Did you know we can make tags files for the Rust codebase? make TAGS.{vi,emacs}! It no longer generates tags for all of LLVM and libuv, too.
• The pidigits benchmark has been resurrected.
• A native mutex type now exists, and it doesn't depend on C++.
• Some more derived methods are marked for inlining.
• A bunch more native file IO was implemented, too.
• We now have support for the win64 calling convention. Additionally, the ABI of extern fns is now actually used.
• The tutorial now covers alternatives to ownership much better.
• A lint for unsafe blocks has been added.
• A minor bug with privacy has been fixed.

New Contributors

Our first-time contributors this week are:

• Dave Hodder
• Ian Daniher
• Isaac Dupree
• g3xzh

Weekly Meeting

The weekly meeting discussed static linking, changing how let _ = foo is handled, task joining, autoderef, and user-defined vector types.

Announcements, etc

• A new tutorial project has sprung up.

Servo

Thanks to Lars Bergstrom for This Week in Servo! Servo is Rust's sister project, and I think it's nice to be able to see a highlevel of its progress. Maybe TWiS will graduate to a separate blog someday.

This Week in Servo

Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language. Starting this week, TWiR will include a status update from Servo.

There were 14 landed PRs this week.

Notable additions

• Patrick Walton rewrote flow construction so that we can make it incremental and parallelizable in https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1271
• Ryan Choi added support for transparant PNG files in https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1288
• Junyoung Cho added the ACID2 test file, which is one of the big focuses of the team over the coming months, in https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1287
• In his first Servo PR, Adenilson Cavalcanti contributed a help message for the binary in https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1277

Meetings

Having spent the prior week at a workweek with Samsung in Korea (where there were several presentations on both Rust and Servo! https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Videos-and-presentations ), the meeting was pretty light this week. It mainly covered getting more formal tracking of the work required for ACID2 and prioritizing Windows support.