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

News & Blog Posts

Redox released its first ISO image.
Starting a new Rust project right, with error-chain.
Reflections on rusting trust.
Zero-cost abstractions in Rust.
Building native macOS applications with Rust.
ripgrep code review with focus on its design decisions and interesting implementation solutions.
Taking TRust-DNS IntoFuture.
WebVR coming to Servo: Architecture and latency optimizations.
Three bytes and a space: or, Rust bugs, non-compliance, and how I learned to love IRC.
I used to use pointers - now what? Common C pointer patterns, and what to do in Rust instead.
Russian dolls and clean Rust code. Replacing nested pattern matching with and_then.
24 days of Rust - cargo subcommands.
24 days of Rust - structured logging.
24 days of Rust - environment variables.
[survey] Crate evaluation user research survey.

Other Weeklies from Rust Community

This week in Rust docs 33. Updates from the Rust documentation team.
This week in TiKV 2016-12-05. TiKV is a distributed Key-Value database.
This week in Ruma 2016-12-04. Ruma is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.

Crate of the Week

This week's Crate of the Week is seahash, a statistically well-tested fast hash. Thanks to Vikrant Chaudhary for the 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] unicode-reverse: Fuzz testing. unicode-reverse is a Unicode-aware in-place string reverse function in Rust.
[easy] tera: Use 64 bits for int/float. Tera is a template engine for Rust based on Jinja2/Django.
[easy] tera: Fix include whitespace.
[easy] tera: Adding tests (not unit test, the tester feature).
[hard] tera: Add not to mean !.
[hard] tera: Add a magical variable that dumps the context.
[less easy] rayon: Parity with the Iterator trait. Rayon: A data parallelism library for Rust.

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

Updates from Rust Core

93 pull requests were merged in the last week. This contains a good number of plugin-breaking changes.

New Contributors

Clar Charr
Theodore DeRego
Xidorn Quan

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 1636: Require documentation for all new features.

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:

New RFCs

Default struct field values.
Alloca for Rust. Add a builtin fn core::mem::reserve<'a, T>(elements: usize) -> StackSlice<'a, T> that reserves space for the given number of elements on the stack and returns a StackSlice<'a, T> to it which derefs to &'a [T].

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:

Final comment period: