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Rust 0.5 released

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Re: Rust 0.5 released

#2

Post by kibwen »

0.5 was a rather smaller release than previous ones, due to Niko being distracted by RiverTrail[1] and ParallelJS[2] and Graydon being distracted by setting up the new Buildbot infrastructure as well as relicensing the compiler.[3] There have been some big changes (most for the better, IMO), but there's still a rather lot of half-finished things floating around. All the same caveats of past releases apply: work in progress; use at your own risk; the language will continue to change; code that you write now will break in subsequent releases.

0.6 should be a rather exciting cycle though. I'm hopeful that a lot of the semantic cleanup will be more-or-less complete. Also, they're getting a new but temporary full-time developer in the form of John Clements,[4] who's taking a sabbatical from his university position to work on Rust.

[1] https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/wiki

[2] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/12/05/self...

[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.rust.devel/2593

[4] http://www.brinckerhoff.org/clements/

Re: Rust 0.5 released

#3

Post by kodablah »

Yay, item macros. Means top-level elements can now dynamically created. Also another big change is "auto-move" where you don't have to write move everywhere.

Also the repl is nice. I think having this and having Rust bootstrapped give it a leg up on Go.

Re: Rust 0.5 released

#4

Post by pcwalton »

kibwen wrote: post #2

0.5 was a rather smaller release than previous ones, due to Niko being distracted by RiverTrail[1] and ParallelJS[2] and Graydon being distracted by setting up the new Buildbot infrastructure as well as relicensing the compiler.[3] There have been some big changes (most for the better, IMO), but there's still a rather lot of half-finished things floating around. All the same caveats of past releases apply: work in pr…

"code that you write now will break in subsequent releases."

It's not that bad; we're trying to be mostly backwards compatible from here on out. I was hoping that 0.5 would be the backwards-compatible release; it's not, mostly due to the name resolution changes that still aren't done, but it's close. It should not be much work to upgrade your code from 0.5 to 0.6, much less than 0.3 to 0.4 or 0.4 to 0.5.

Re: Rust 0.5 released

#5

Post by pnathan »

I've really become quite a Rust fanboy, although I haven't written tons of code in it.

IMO, it's considerably more accessible than Haskell or a ML-family. I'm not precisely sure why, but it seems to "make sense" in a very straightforward way. Some of it I think is lessons-learned from older languages, some of it might be the syntax, some of it just might be mental fit.

Certainly - and this is a huge deal - I could realistically see using Rust in an enterprise scenario where we don't null pointer exceptions but we do want type safety yet we don't want to buy into Java or go full functional programmer with Haskell. Of course that's a few years out, but, but but! That's cool!

I look forward to using this latest version and working away on writing Rust at home. :-)

Re: Rust 0.5 released

#8

Post by dkhenry »

I think once rust stabilizes a little more, its going to be a excellent language. The real big thing is going to be stand alone rust programs. I know they have two tickets open ,but I would love to be able to write rust programs that don't require the core library to run.
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