Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @ThisWeekInRust on Twitter or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

Updates from Rust Community

Official

Foundation

Project/Tooling Updates

Observations/Thoughts

Rust Walkthroughs

Miscellaneous

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is embedded-cli-rs, a library that makes it easy to create CLIs on embedded devices.

Thanks to Sviatoslav Kokurin for the self-suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not 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.

CFP - Speakers

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

  • RustNL 2024 CFP closes 2024-02-19 | Delft, The Netherlands | Event date: 2024-05-07 & 2024-05-08
  • NDC Techtown CFP closes 2024-04-14 | Kongsberg, Norway | Event date: 2024-09-09 to 2024-09-12

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the submission website through a PR to TWiR.

Updates from the Rust Project

309 pull requests were merged in the last week

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

Rust's CI was down most of the week, leading to a much smaller collection of commits than usual. Results are mostly neutral for the week.

Triage done by @simulacrum. Revision range: 5c9c3c78..0984bec

0 Regressions, 2 Improvements, 1 Mixed; 1 of them in rollups 17 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

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.

RFCs

  • No RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Language Reference

  • No Language Reference RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

Unsafe Code Guidelines

  • No Unsafe Code Guideline RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

New and Updated RFCs

Call for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization. The following RFCs would benefit from user testing before moving forward:

  • No RFCs issued a call for testing this week.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear on the above list, add the new call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2024-02-07 - 2024-03-06 🦀

Virtual

Asia

Europe

North America

Oceania

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

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

My take on this is that you cannot use async Rust correctly and fluently without understanding Arc, Mutex, the mutability of variables/references, and how async and await syntax compiles in the end. Rust forces you to understand how and why things are the way they are. It gives you minimal abstraction to do things that could’ve been tedious to do yourself.

I got a chance to work on two projects that drastically forced me to understand how async/await works. The first one is to transform a library that is completely sync and only requires a sync trait to talk to the outside service. This all sounds fine, right? Well, this becomes a problem when we try to port it into browsers. The browser is single-threaded and cannot block the JavaScript runtime at all! It is arguably the most weird environment for Rust users. It is simply impossible to rewrite the whole library, as it has already been shipped to production on other platforms.

What we did instead was rewrite the network part using async syntax, but using our own generator. The idea is simple: the generator produces a future when called, and the produced future can be awaited. But! The produced future contains an arc pointer to the generator. That means we can feed the generator the value we are waiting for, then the caller who holds the reference to the generator can feed the result back to the function and resume it. For the browser, we use the native browser API to derive the network communications; for other platforms, we just use regular blocking network calls. The external interface remains unchanged for other platforms.

Honestly, I don’t think any other language out there could possibly do this. Maybe C or C++, but which will never have the same development speed and developer experience.

I believe people have already mentioned it, but the current asynchronous model of Rust is the most reasonable choice. It does create pain for developers, but on the other hand, there is no better asynchronous model for Embedded or WebAssembly.

– /u/Top_Outlandishness78 on /r/rust

Thanks to Brian Kung for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, cdmistman, ericseppanen, extrawurst, andrewpollack, U007D, kolharsam, joelmarcey, mariannegoldin, bennyvasquez.

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