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.

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Updates from Rust Community

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Crate of the Week

This week's crate is print_bytes, a library to print arbitrary bytes to a stream as losslessly as possible.

Thanks to dylni 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.

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

Updates from Rust Core

339 pull requests were merged in the last week

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

  • 2020-06-30. Three regressions, two of them on rollups; two improvements, one on a rollup.

Approved RFCs

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

RFCs

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New RFCs

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Quote of the Week

References are a sharp tool and there are roughly three different approaches to sharp tools.

  1. Don't give programmers sharp tools. They may make mistakes and cut their fingers off. This is the Java/Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP... approach.
  2. Give programmers all the sharp tools they want. They are professionals and if they cut their fingers off it's their own fault. This is the C/C++ approach.
  3. Give programmers sharp tools, but put guards on them so they can't accidentally cut their fingers off. This is Rust's approach.

Lifetime annotations are a safety guard on references. Rust's references have no sychronization and no reference counting -- that's what makes them sharp. References in category-1 languages (which typically do have synchronization and reference counting) are "blunted": they're not really quite as effective as category-2 and -3 references, but they don't cut you, and they still work; they might just slow you down a bit.

So, frankly, I like lifetime annotations because they prevent me from cutting my fingers off.

trentj on rust-users

Thanks to Ivan Tham for the suggestions!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, and cdmistman.

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