Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

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

Updates from Rust Community

Blog Posts

Rust and the future of systems programming.
sccache, Mozilla’s distributed compiler cache, now written in Rust.
Introducing Reqwest. Reqwest is an ergonomic HTTP Client for Rust.
Putting the Rust in Trust. A path to Rust formal verification.
Measuring the impact of github bots on Rust community participation.
Computing the result of the 2016 Australian election with Rust.
Unlocking the power of parallelism with Rust.
A deep dive into TiKV. TiKV is a distributed Key-Value database which is based on the design of Google Spanner, F1, and HBase.
Packaging Rust binaries. Making Rust packages for Linux with Snappy.
Rust from a hacker's point of view.
Understanding lifetimes in Rust.
Exposing Rust objects to C code.
Debugging Rust code inside a C library.
Rustup tutorial: Downgrading nightlies.

News & Project Updates

The MSP430 LLVM backend has been enabled in the latest nightly.
Rust documentation is now optional and opt-in when installing via rustup.
Discovery: Discover the world of microcontrollers through Rust! Discovery is a book about (programming) embedded systems / microcontrollers aimed at people without previous experience with them.

Other Weeklies from Rust Community

This week in Rust docs 31. Updates from the Rust documentation team.
What's coming up in imag (20). imag is a text based personal information management suite.
This week in TiKV 2016-11-21. TiKV is a distributed Key-Value database.
This week in PlanetKit 4. PlanetKit generates colorful blobs that might one day resemble planets.

Crate of the Week

This week's Crate of the Week is cargo-benchcmp. cargo-benchcmp generates nice before-after summaries for benchmarks.

Thanks to bluss for this week's suggestion. Submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Call for Participation

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

[less easy] rayon: Parity with the Iterator trait.
[easy] rust: Compiling libunwind with --test for arm-musl targets produces dynamically linked binaries.
[less easy] rust: Separate foreign items in HIR.
[less easy] rust: Separate trait items from trait.
[easy] rust: docs: Explain why/when .lines() returns an error.
[easy] git-series: Highlight trailing whitespace.
[easy] git-series: Support rebase --exec.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here.

Updates from Rust Core

105 pull requests were merged in the last week.

New Contributors

Brett Cooley
John Downey
jsen-
Robert Vally
Steve Smith

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

RFC 1725: unaligned access via std::ptr.

Final Comment Period

Every week the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now. This week's FCPs are:

Require documentation for all new features.

New RFCs

Style RFCs

Style RFCs are part of the process for deciding on style guidelines for the Rust community and defaults for Rustfmt. The process is similar to the RFC process, but we try to reach rough consensus on issues (including a final comment period) before progressing to PRs. Just like the RFC process, all users are welcome to comment and submit RFCs. If you want to help decide what Rust code should look like, come get involved!

PRs: