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

• How to translate a large C project to Rust.
• Debian Rust packaging policy (draft).
• Comparing Diesel and rust-postgres.
• Idiomatic callbacks in Rust.
• Benchmarks vs. The World.
• List of unstable feature gates in Rust.
• Enforcing drop order in Rust.
• rst 0.3 released, now with a web UI.
• [video] Extending Python with Rust.

24 Days of Rust

24 days of Rust is a series of articles introducing Rust language features, useful libraries, and cool projects built with Rust. Last week's articles are:

• derive_builder.
• static initialization.
• serde.
• winreg.
• nom part 1.
• nom part 2.

Other Weeklies from Rust Community

• This week in Rust docs 34. Updates from the Rust documentation team.
• This week in Ruma 2016-12-11. Ruma is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.
• This week in TiKV 2016-12-12. TiKV is a distributed Key-Value database.
• These weeks in Ruru 5. Ruru lets you write native Ruby extensions in Rust.

Crate of the Week

This week, sadly no crate was nominated. 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.

• [easy] gimli: Provide NativeEndian default for generic Endianity type parameters. gimli is a lazy, zero-copy parser for the DWARF debugging format.
• [easy] tera: Fix include whitespace. Tera is a template engine for Rust based on Jinja2/Django.
• [easy] tera: Adding tests (not unit test, the tester feature).
• [hard] tera: Add not to mean !.
• [less easy] unicode-reverse: Fuzz testing. unicode-reverse is a Unicode-aware in-place string reverse function in Rust.
• [less easy] rayon: Parity with the Iterator trait. Rayon: A data parallelism library for Rust.
• [easy] servo: Canvas rendering context can be destroyed after the canvas thread exits.
• [easy] servo: Remove ResponseAction.

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

Updates from Rust Core

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

• Use link(kind) annotation to fix native Windows imports (RFC #1717)
• Function arity errors now show the original definition
• HashMap/-Set now pre-allocate smarter on extend(_)
• Faster sort() – Epic speedups
• More forwarded ExactSizeIterator / is_empty()
• Stricter lifetimes for LateLintPass (Plugin-unbreaking 🙂)
• Iterator::nth(_) no longer needs self to be Sized
• Incremental compilation will now recompile items on visibility change
• -Z always_encode_mir
• dylib symbol handling improvements
• tidy now checks the licenses of vendored dependencies
• Rustbuild is now the default build system (1 year in the making)
• Allow --test on procedural-macro crates
• Cargo will pick up build.rs scripts by default unless package.build = false explicitly, for now warns
• cargo test --all for Workspaces

New Contributors

• Stjepan Glavina

Approved RFCs

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

No RFCs were approved this week.

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:

• Allow Self to appear in the where clause of trait impls.
• Safe intrinsics. Allow intrinsics to be marked as safe, overriding the implicit unsafe from being in an extern block.
• Procedural macros.

New RFCs

• Warn by default when encountering a statement which only consists of an equality comparison.

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:

• Conventions for Cargo.toml files.
• Customising Rustfmt (FCP).

Ready for PR:

• boolean and arithmetic expressions.
• struct and union declarations.
• type aliases.
• match.

Other notable issues:

• function declarations.

Upcoming Events

• 12/14. South Florida Rust: Intro to Rust.
• 12/14. Rust Community Team Meeting at #rust-community on irc.mozilla.org.
• 12/14. Rust Documentation Team Meeting at #rust-docs on irc.mozilla.org.
• 12/15. Rust release triage.
• 12/15. Rust Bay Area: Syn/Macros 1.1, Helix, and Binding C in OpenSSL.
• 12/17. South Florida Rust: Intro to Rust.
• 12/21. Rust Community Team Meeting at #rust-community on irc.mozilla.org.
• 12/21. Rust Documentation Team Meeting at #rust-docs on irc.mozilla.org.

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

fn work(on: RustProject) -> Money

• Mozilla Research Internship (US/INTL) - University 2017.

Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust to get your job offers listed here!

Quote of the Week

— Programming People by David Marino.

Thanks to skade for the suggestion.

Submit your quotes for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nasa42, llogiq, and brson.