RELEASES.md

Version 1.27.0 (2018-06-21)

Language

• Removed 'proc' from the reserved keywords list. This allows proc to be used as an identifer.
• The dyn syntax is now available. This syntax is equivalent to the bare Trait syntax, and should make it clearer when being used in tandem with impl Trait. Since it is equivalent to the following syntax: &Trait == &dyn Trait, &mut Trait == &mut dyn Trait, and Box<Trait> == Box<dyn Trait>.
• Attributes on generic parameters such as types and lifetimes are now stable. e.g. fn foo<#[lifetime_attr] 'a, #[type_attr] T: 'a>() {}
• The #[must_use] attribute can now also be used on functions as well as types. It provides a lint that by default warns users when the value returned by a function has not been used.

Compiler

• Added the armv5te-unknown-linux-musl target.

Libraries

• SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) on x86/x86_64 is now stable. This includes arch::x86 & arch::x86_64 modules which contain SIMD intrinsics, a new macro called is_x86_feature_detected!, the #[target_feature(enable="")] attribute, and adding target_feature = "" to the cfg attribute.
• A lot of methods for [u8], f32, and f64 previously only available in std are now available in core.
• The generic Rhs type parameter on ops::{Shl, ShlAssign, Shr} now defaults to Self.
• std::str::replace now has the #[must_use] attribute to clarify that the operation isn't done in place.
• Clone::clone, Iterator::collect, and ToOwned::to_owned now have the #[must_use] attribute to warn about unused potentially expensive allocations.

Stabilized APIs

• DoubleEndedIterator::rfind
• DoubleEndedIterator::rfold
• DoubleEndedIterator::try_rfold
• Duration::from_micros
• Duration::from_nanos
• Duration::subsec_micros
• Duration::subsec_millis
• HashMap::remove_entry
• Iterator::try_fold
• Iterator::try_for_each
• NonNull::cast
• Option::filter
• String::replace_range
• Take::set_limit
• hint::unreachable_unchecked
• os::unix::process::parent_id
• ptr::swap_nonoverlapping
• slice::rsplit_mut
• slice::rsplit
• slice::swap_with_slice

Cargo

• cargo-metadata now includes authors, categories, keywords, readme, and repository fields.
• cargo-metadata now includes a package's metadata table.
• Added the --target-dir optional argument. This allows you to specify a different directory than target for placing compilation artifacts.
• Cargo will be adding automatic target inference for binaries, benchmarks, examples, and tests in the Rust 2018 edition. If your project specifies specific targets e.g. using [[bin]] and have other binaries in locations where cargo would infer a binary, Cargo will produce a warning. You can disable this feature ahead of time by setting any of the following autobins, autobenches, autoexamples, autotests to false.
• Cargo will now cache compiler information. This can be disabled by setting CARGO_CACHE_RUSTC_INFO=0 in your environment.

Misc

• Added “The Rustc book” into the official documentation. “The Rustc book” documents and teaches how to use the rustc compiler.
• All books available on doc.rust-lang.org are now searchable.

Compatibility Notes

• Calling a CharExt or StrExt method directly on core will no longer work. e.g. ::core::prelude::v1::StrExt::is_empty("") will not compile, "".is_empty() will still compile.
• Debug output on atomic::{AtomicBool, AtomicIsize, AtomicPtr, AtomicUsize} will only print the inner type. e.g. print!("{:?}", AtomicBool::new(true)) will print true not AtomicBool(true).
• The maximum number for repr(align(N)) is now 2²⁹. Previously you could enter higher numbers but they were not supported by LLVM. Up to 512MB alignment should cover all use cases.

Version 1.26.2 (2018-06-05)

Compatibility Notes

• The borrow checker was fixed to avoid unsoundness when using match ergonomics

Version 1.26.1 (2018-05-29)

Tools

• RLS now works on Windows
• Rustfmt stopped badly formatting text in some cases

Compatibility Notes

• fn main() -> impl Trait no longer works for non-Termination trait This reverts an accidental stabilization.
• NaN > NaN no longer returns true in const-fn contexts
• Prohibit using turbofish for impl Trait in method arguments

Version 1.26.0 (2018-05-10)

Language

• Closures now implement Copy and/or Clone if all captured variables implement either or both traits.
• The inclusive range syntax e.g. for x in 0..=10 is now stable.
• Stablise '_. The underscore lifetime can be used anywhere where a lifetime can be elided.
• impl Trait is now stable allowing you to have abstract types in returns or in function parameters. e.g. fn foo() -> impl Iterator<Item=u8> or fn open(path: impl AsRef<Path>).
• Pattern matching will now automatically apply dereferences.
• 128-bit integers in the form of u128 and i128 are now stable.
• main can now return Result<(), E: Debug> in addition to ().
• A lot of operations are now available in a const context. E.g. You can now index into constant arrays, reference and dereference into constants, and use Tuple struct constructors.
• Fixed entry slice patterns are now stable. e.g.

  let points = [1, 2, 3, 4];
  match points {
      [1, 2, 3, 4] => println!("All points were sequential."),
      _ => println!("Not all points were sequential."),
  }

Compiler

• LLD is now used as the default linker for wasm32-unknown-unknown.
• Fixed exponential projection complexity on nested types. This can provide up to a ~12% reduction in compile times for certain crates.
• Added the --remap-path-prefix option to rustc. Allowing you to remap path prefixes outputted by the compiler.
• Added powerpc-unknown-netbsd target.

Libraries

• Implemented From<u16> for usize & From<{u8, i16}> for isize.
• Added hexadecimal formatting for integers with fmt::Debug e.g. assert!(format!("{:02x?}", b"Foo\0") == "[46, 6f, 6f, 00]")
• Implemented Default, Hash for cmp::Reverse.
• Optimized str::repeat being 8x faster in large cases.
• ascii::escape_default is now available in libcore.
• Trailing commas are now supported in std and core macros.
• Implemented Copy, Clone for cmp::Reverse
• Implemented Clone for char::{ToLowercase, ToUppercase}.

Stabilized APIs

• *const T::add
• *const T::copy_to_nonoverlapping
• *const T::copy_to
• *const T::read_unaligned
• *const T::read_volatile
• *const T::read
• *const T::sub
• *const T::wrapping_add
• *const T::wrapping_sub
• *mut T::add
• *mut T::copy_to_nonoverlapping
• *mut T::copy_to
• *mut T::read_unaligned
• *mut T::read_volatile
• *mut T::read
• *mut T::replace
• *mut T::sub
• *mut T::swap
• *mut T::wrapping_add
• *mut T::wrapping_sub
• *mut T::write_bytes
• *mut T::write_unaligned
• *mut T::write_volatile
• *mut T::write
• Box::leak
• FromUtf8Error::as_bytes
• LocalKey::try_with
• Option::cloned
• btree_map::Entry::and_modify
• fs::read_to_string
• fs::read
• fs::write
• hash_map::Entry::and_modify
• iter::FusedIterator
• ops::RangeInclusive
• ops::RangeToInclusive
• process::id
• slice::rotate_left
• slice::rotate_right
• String::retain

Cargo

• Cargo will now output path to custom commands when -v is passed with --list
• The Cargo binary version is now the same as the Rust version

Misc

• The second edition of "The Rust Programming Language" book is now recommended over the first.

Compatibility Notes

• aliasing a Fn trait as dyn no longer works. E.g. the following syntax is now invalid.

  use std::ops::Fn as dyn;
  fn g(_: Box<dyn(std::fmt::Debug)>) {}
  

• The result of dereferences are no longer promoted to 'static. e.g.

  fn main() {
      const PAIR: &(i32, i32) = &(0, 1);
      let _reversed_pair: &'static _ = &(PAIR.1, PAIR.0); // Doesn't work
  }

• Deprecate AsciiExt trait in favor of inherent methods.
• ".e0" will now no longer parse as 0.0 and will instead cause an error.
• Removed hoedown from rustdoc.
• Bounds on higher-kinded lifetimes a hard error.

Version 1.25.0 (2018-03-29)

Language

• Stabilised #[repr(align(x))]. RFC 1358
• You can now use nested groups of imports. e.g. use std::{fs::File, io::Read, path::{Path, PathBuf}};
• You can now have | at the start of a match arm. e.g.

enum Foo { A, B, C }

fn main() {
    let x = Foo::A;
    match x {
        | Foo::A
        | Foo::B => println!("AB"),
        | Foo::C => println!("C"),
    }
}

Compiler

• Upgraded to LLVM 6.
• Added -C lto=val option.
• Added i586-unknown-linux-musl target

Libraries

• Impl Send for process::Command on Unix.
• Impl PartialEq and Eq for ParseCharError.
• UnsafeCell::into_inner is now safe.
• Implement libstd for CloudABI.
• Float::{from_bits, to_bits} is now available in libcore.
• Implement AsRef<Path> for Component
• Implemented Write for Cursor<&mut Vec<u8>>
• Moved Duration to libcore.

Stabilized APIs

• Location::column
• ptr::NonNull

The following functions can now be used in a constant expression. eg. static MINUTE: Duration = Duration::from_secs(60);

• Duration::new
• Duration::from_secs
• Duration::from_millis

Cargo

• cargo new no longer removes rust or rs prefixs/suffixs.
• cargo new now defaults to creating a binary crate, instead of a library crate.

Misc

• Rust by example is now shipped with new releases

Compatibility Notes

• Deprecated net::lookup_host.
• rustdoc has switched to pulldown as the default markdown renderer.
• The borrow checker was sometimes incorrectly permitting overlapping borrows around indexing operations (see #47349). This has been fixed (which also enabled some correct code that used to cause errors (e.g. #33903 and #46095).
• Removed deprecated unstable attribute #[simd].

Version 1.24.1 (2018-03-01)

• Do not abort when unwinding through FFI
• Emit UTF-16 files for linker arguments on Windows
• Make the error index generator work again
• Cargo will warn on Windows 7 if an update is needed.

Version 1.24.0 (2018-02-15)

Language

• External sysv64 ffi is now available. eg. extern "sysv64" fn foo () {}

Compiler

• rustc now uses 16 codegen units by default for release builds. For the fastest builds, utilize codegen-units=1.
• Added armv4t-unknown-linux-gnueabi target.
• Add aarch64-unknown-openbsd support

Libraries

• str::find::<char> now uses memchr. This should lead to a 10x improvement in performance in the majority of cases.
• OsStr's Debug implementation is now lossless and consistent with Windows.
• time::{SystemTime, Instant} now implement Hash.
• impl From<bool> for AtomicBool
• impl From<{CString, &CStr}> for {Arc<CStr>, Rc<CStr>}
• impl From<{OsString, &OsStr}> for {Arc<OsStr>, Rc<OsStr>}
• impl From<{PathBuf, &Path}> for {Arc<Path>, Rc<Path>}
• float::from_bits now just uses transmute. This provides some optimisations from LLVM.
• Copied AsciiExt methods onto char
• Remove T: Sized requirement on ptr::is_null()
• impl From<RecvError> for {TryRecvError, RecvTimeoutError}
• Optimised f32::{min, max} to generate more efficient x86 assembly
• [u8]::contains now uses memchr which provides a 3x speed improvement

Stabilized APIs

• RefCell::replace
• RefCell::swap
• atomic::spin_loop_hint

The following functions can now be used in a constant expression. eg. let buffer: [u8; size_of::<usize>()];, static COUNTER: AtomicUsize = AtomicUsize::new(1);

• AtomicBool::new
• AtomicUsize::new
• AtomicIsize::new
• AtomicPtr::new
• Cell::new
• {integer}::min_value
• {integer}::max_value
• mem::size_of
• mem::align_of
• ptr::null
• ptr::null_mut
• RefCell::new
• UnsafeCell::new

Cargo

• Added a workspace.default-members config that overrides implied --all in virtual workspaces.
• Enable incremental by default on development builds. Also added configuration keys to Cargo.toml and .cargo/config to disable on a per-project or global basis respectively.

Misc

Compatibility Notes

• Floating point types Debug impl now always prints a decimal point.
• Ipv6Addr now rejects superfluous ::'s in IPv6 addresses This is in accordance with IETF RFC 4291 §2.2.
• Unwinding will no longer go past FFI boundaries, and will instead abort.
• Formatter::flags method is now deprecated. The sign_plus, sign_minus, alternate, and sign_aware_zero_pad should be used instead.
• Leading zeros in tuple struct members is now an error
• column!() macro is one-based instead of zero-based
• fmt::Arguments can no longer be shared across threads
• Access to #[repr(packed)] struct fields is now unsafe
• Cargo sets a different working directory for the compiler

Version 1.23.0 (2018-01-04)

Language

• Arbitrary auto traits are now permitted in trait objects.
• rustc now uses subtyping on the left hand side of binary operations. Which should fix some confusing errors in some operations.

Compiler

• Enabled TrapUnreachable in LLVM which should mitigate the impact of undefined behaviour.
• rustc now suggests renaming import if names clash.
• Display errors/warnings correctly when there are zero-width or wide characters.
• rustc now avoids unnecessary copies of arguments that are simple bindings This should improve memory usage on average by 5-10%.
• Updated musl used to build musl rustc to 1.1.17

Libraries

• Allow a trailing comma in assert_eq/ne macro
• Implement Hash for raw pointers to unsized types
• impl From<*mut T> for AtomicPtr<T>
• impl From<usize/isize> for AtomicUsize/AtomicIsize.
• Removed the T: Sync requirement for RwLock<T>: Send
• Removed T: Sized requirement for {<*const T>, <*mut T>}::as_ref and <*mut T>::as_mut
• Optimized Thread::{park, unpark} implementation
• Improved SliceExt::binary_search performance.
• impl FromIterator<()> for ()
• Copied AsciiExt trait methods to primitive types. Use of AsciiExt is now deprecated.

Stabilized APIs

Cargo

• Cargo now supports uninstallation of multiple packages eg. cargo uninstall foo bar uninstalls foo and bar.
• Added unit test checking to cargo check
• Cargo now lets you install a specific version using cargo install --version

Misc

• Releases now ship with the Cargo book documentation.
• rustdoc now prints rendering warnings on every run.

Compatibility Notes

• Changes have been made to type equality to make it more correct, in rare cases this could break some code. Tracking issue for further information
• char::escape_debug now uses Unicode 10 over 9.
• Upgraded Android SDK to 27, and NDK to r15c. This drops support for Android 9, the minimum supported version is Android 14.
• Bumped the minimum LLVM to 3.9

Version 1.22.1 (2017-11-22)

• Update Cargo to fix an issue with macOS 10.13 "High Sierra"

Version 1.22.0 (2017-11-22)

Language

• non_snake_case lint now allows extern no-mangle functions
• Now accepts underscores in unicode escapes
• T op= &T now works for numeric types. eg. let mut x = 2; x += &8;
• types that impl Drop are now allowed in const and static types

Compiler

• rustc now defaults to having 16 codegen units at debug on supported platforms.
• rustc will no longer inline in codegen units when compiling for debug This should decrease compile times for debug builds.
• strict memory alignment now enabled on ARMv6
• Remove support for the PNaCl target le32-unknown-nacl

Libraries

• Allow atomic operations up to 32 bits on armv5te_unknown_linux_gnueabi
• Box<Error> now impls From<Cow<str>>
• std::mem::Discriminant is now guaranteed to be Send + Sync
• fs::copy now returns the length of the main stream on NTFS.
• Properly detect overflow in Instant += Duration.
• impl Hasher for {&mut Hasher, Box<Hasher>}
• impl fmt::Debug for SplitWhitespace.
• Option<T> now impls Try This allows for using ? with Option types.

Stabilized APIs

Cargo

• Cargo will now build multi file examples in subdirectories of the examples folder that have a main.rs file.
• Changed [root] to [package] in Cargo.lock Packages with the old format will continue to work and can be updated with cargo update.
• Now supports vendoring git repositories

Misc

• libbacktrace is now available on Apple platforms.
• Stabilised the compile_fail attribute for code fences in doc-comments. This now lets you specify that a given code example will fail to compile.

Compatibility Notes

• The minimum Android version that rustc can build for has been bumped to 4.0 from 2.3
• Allowing T op= &T for numeric types has broken some type inference cases

Version 1.21.0 (2017-10-12)

Language

• You can now use static references for literals. Example:

  fn main() {
      let x: &'static u32 = &0;
  }

• Relaxed path syntax. Optional :: before < is now allowed in all contexts. Example:

  my_macro!(Vec<i32>::new); // Always worked
  my_macro!(Vec::<i32>::new); // Now works

Compiler

• Upgraded jemalloc to 4.5.0
• Enabled unwinding panics on Redox
• Now runs LLVM in parallel during translation phase. This should reduce peak memory usage.

Libraries

• Generate builtin impls for Clone for all arrays and tuples that are T: Clone
• Stdin, Stdout, and Stderr now implement AsRawFd.
• Rc and Arc now implement From<&[T]> where T: Clone, From<str>, From<String>, From<Box<T>> where T: ?Sized, and From<Vec<T>>.

Stabilized APIs

std::mem::discriminant

Cargo

• You can now call cargo install with multiple package names
• Cargo commands inside a virtual workspace will now implicitly pass --all
• Added a [patch] section to Cargo.toml to handle prepublication dependencies RFC 1969
• include & exclude fields in Cargo.toml now accept gitignore like patterns
• Added the --all-targets option
• Using required dependencies as a feature is now deprecated and emits a warning

Misc

• Cargo docs are moving to doc.rust-lang.org/cargo
• The rustdoc book is now available at doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc
• Added a preview of RLS has been made available through rustup Install with rustup component add rls-preview
• std::os documentation for Unix, Linux, and Windows now appears on doc.rust-lang.org Previously only showed std::os::unix.

Compatibility Notes

• Changes in method matching against higher-ranked types This may cause breakage in subtyping corner cases. A more in-depth explanation is available.
• rustc's JSON error output's byte position start at top of file. Was previously relative to the rustc's internal CodeMap struct which required the unstable library libsyntax to correctly use.
• unused_results lint no longer ignores booleans

Version 1.20.0 (2017-08-31)

Language

• Associated constants are now stabilised.
• A lot of macro bugs are now fixed.

Compiler

• Struct fields are now properly coerced to the expected field type.
• Enabled wasm LLVM backend WASM can now be built with the wasm32-experimental-emscripten target.
• Changed some of the error messages to be more helpful.
• Add support for RELRO(RELocation Read-Only) for platforms that support it.
• rustc now reports the total number of errors on compilation failure previously this was only the number of errors in the pass that failed.
• Expansion in rustc has been sped up 29x.
• added msp430-none-elf target.
• rustc will now suggest one-argument enum variant to fix type mismatch when applicable
• Fixes backtraces on Redox
• rustc now identifies different versions of same crate when absolute paths of different types match in an error message.

Libraries

• Relaxed Debug constraints on {HashMap,BTreeMap}::{Keys,Values}.
• Impl PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord, Debug, Hash for unsized tuples.
• Impl fmt::{Display, Debug} for Ref, RefMut, MutexGuard, RwLockReadGuard, RwLockWriteGuard
• Impl Clone for DefaultHasher.
• Impl Sync for SyncSender.
• Impl FromStr for char
• Fixed how {f32, f64}::{is_sign_negative, is_sign_positive} handles NaN.
• allow messages in the unimplemented!() macro. ie. unimplemented!("Waiting for 1.21 to be stable")
• pub(restricted) is now supported in the thread_local! macro.
• Upgrade to Unicode 10.0.0
• Reimplemented {f32, f64}::{min, max} in Rust instead of using CMath.
• Skip the main thread's manual stack guard on Linux
• Iterator::nth for ops::{Range, RangeFrom} is now done in O(1) time
• #[repr(align(N))] attribute max number is now 2^31 - 1. This was previously 2^15.
• {OsStr, Path}::Display now avoids allocations where possible

Stabilized APIs

• CStr::into_c_string
• CString::as_c_str
• CString::into_boxed_c_str
• Chain::get_mut
• Chain::get_ref
• Chain::into_inner
• Option::get_or_insert_with
• Option::get_or_insert
• OsStr::into_os_string
• OsString::into_boxed_os_str
• Take::get_mut
• Take::get_ref
• Utf8Error::error_len
• char::EscapeDebug
• char::escape_debug
• compile_error!
• f32::from_bits
• f32::to_bits
• f64::from_bits
• f64::to_bits
• mem::ManuallyDrop
• slice::sort_unstable_by_key
• slice::sort_unstable_by
• slice::sort_unstable
• str::from_boxed_utf8_unchecked
• str::as_bytes_mut
• str::as_bytes_mut
• str::from_utf8_mut
• str::from_utf8_unchecked_mut
• str::get_mut
• str::get_unchecked_mut
• str::get_unchecked
• str::get
• str::into_boxed_bytes

Cargo

• Cargo API token location moved from ~/.cargo/config to ~/.cargo/credentials.
• Cargo will now build main.rs binaries that are in sub-directories of src/bin. ie. Having src/bin/server/main.rs and src/bin/client/main.rs generates target/debug/server and target/debug/client
• You can now specify version of a binary when installed through cargo install using --vers.
• Added --no-fail-fast flag to cargo to run all benchmarks regardless of failure.
• Changed the convention around which file is the crate root.
• The include/exclude property in Cargo.toml now accepts gitignore paths instead of glob patterns. Glob patterns are now deprecated.

Compatibility Notes

• Functions with 'static in their return types will now not be as usable as if they were using lifetime parameters instead.
• The reimplementation of {f32, f64}::is_sign_{negative, positive} now takes the sign of NaN into account where previously didn't.

Version 1.19.0 (2017-07-20)

Language

• Numeric fields can now be used for creating tuple structs. RFC 1506 For example struct Point(u32, u32); let x = Point { 0: 7, 1: 0 };.
• Macro recursion limit increased to 1024 from 64.
• Added lint for detecting unused macros.
• loop can now return a value with break. RFC 1624 For example: let x = loop { break 7; };
• C compatible unions are now available. RFC 1444 They can only contain Copy types and cannot have a Drop implementation. Example: union Foo { bar: u8, baz: usize }
• Non capturing closures can now be coerced into fns, RFC 1558 Example: let foo: fn(u8) -> u8 = |v: u8| { v };

Compiler

• Add support for bootstrapping the Rust compiler toolchain on Android.
• Change arm-linux-androideabi to correspond to the armeabi official ABI. If you wish to continue targeting the armeabi-v7a ABI you should use --target armv7-linux-androideabi.
• Fixed ICE when removing a source file between compilation sessions.
• Minor optimisation of string operations.
• Compiler error message is now aborting due to previous error(s) instead of aborting due to N previous errors This was previously inaccurate and would only count certain kinds of errors.
• The compiler now supports Visual Studio 2017
• The compiler is now built against LLVM 4.0.1 by default
• Added a lot of new error codes
• Added target-feature=+crt-static option RFC 1721 Which allows libraries with C Run-time Libraries(CRT) to be statically linked.
• Fixed various ARM codegen bugs

Libraries

• String now implements FromIterator<Cow<'a, str>> and Extend<Cow<'a, str>>
• Vec now implements From<&mut [T]>
• Box<[u8]> now implements From<Box<str>>
• SplitWhitespace now implements Clone
• [u8]::reverse is now 5x faster and [u16]::reverse is now 1.5x faster
• eprint! and eprintln! macros added to prelude. Same as the print! macros, but for printing to stderr.

Stabilized APIs

• OsString::shrink_to_fit
• cmp::Reverse
• Command::envs
• thread::ThreadId

Cargo

• Build scripts can now add environment variables to the environment the crate is being compiled in. Example: println!("cargo:rustc-env=FOO=bar");
• Subcommands now replace the current process rather than spawning a new child process
• Workspace members can now accept glob file patterns
• Added --all flag to the cargo bench subcommand to run benchmarks of all the members in a given workspace.
• Updated libssh2-sys to 0.2.6
• Target directory path is now in the cargo metadata
• Cargo no longer checks out a local working directory for the crates.io index This should provide smaller file size for the registry, and improve cloning times, especially on Windows machines.
• Added an --exclude option for excluding certain packages when using the --all option
• Cargo will now automatically retry when receiving a 5xx error from crates.io
• The --features option now accepts multiple comma or space delimited values.
• Added support for custom target specific runners

Misc

• Added rust-windbg.cmd for loading rust .natvis files in the Windows Debugger.
• Rust will now release XZ compressed packages
• rustup will now prefer to download rust packages with XZ compression over GZip packages.
• Added the ability to escape # in rust documentation By adding additional #'s ie. ## is now #

Compatibility Notes

• MutexGuard<T> may only be Sync if T is Sync.
• -Z flags are now no longer allowed to be used on the stable compiler. This has been a warning for a year previous to this.
• As a result of the -Z flag change, the cargo-check plugin no longer works. Users should migrate to the built-in check command, which has been available since 1.16.
• Ending a float literal with ._ is now a hard error. Example: 42._ .
• Any use of a private extern crate outside of its module is now a hard error. This was previously a warning.
• use ::self::foo; is now a hard error. self paths are always relative while the :: prefix makes a path absolute, but was ignored and the path was relative regardless.
• Floating point constants in match patterns is now a hard error This was previously a warning.
• Struct or enum constants that don't derive PartialEq & Eq used match patterns is now a hard error This was previously a warning.
• Lifetimes named '_ are no longer allowed. This was previously a warning.
• From the pound escape, lines consisting of multiple #s are now visible
• It is an error to re-export private enum variants. This is known to break a number of crates that depend on an older version of mustache.
• On Windows, if VCINSTALLDIR is set incorrectly, rustc will try to use it to find the linker, and the build will fail where it did not previously

Version 1.18.0 (2017-06-08)

Language

• Stabilize pub(restricted) pub can now accept a module path to make the item visible to just that module tree. Also accepts the keyword crate to make something public to the whole crate but not users of the library. Example: pub(crate) mod utils;. RFC 1422.
• Stabilize #![windows_subsystem] attribute conservative exposure of the /SUBSYSTEM linker flag on Windows platforms. RFC 1665.
• Refactor of trait object type parsing Now ty in macros can accept types like Write + Send, trailing + are now supported in trait objects, and better error reporting for trait objects starting with ?Sized.
• 0e+10 is now a valid floating point literal
• Now warns if you bind a lifetime parameter to 'static
• Tuples, Enum variant fields, and structs with no repr attribute or with #[repr(Rust)] are reordered to minimize padding and produce a smaller representation in some cases.

Compiler

• rustc can now emit mir with --emit mir
• Improved LLVM IR for trivial functions
• Added explanation for E0090(Wrong number of lifetimes are supplied)
• rustc compilation is now 15%-20% faster Thanks to optimisation opportunities found through profiling
• Improved backtrace formatting when panicking

Libraries

• Specialized Vec::from_iter being passed vec::IntoIter if the iterator hasn't been advanced the original Vec is reassembled with no actual iteration or reallocation.
• Simplified HashMap Bucket interface provides performance improvements for iterating and cloning.
• Specialize Vec::from_elem to use calloc
• Fixed Race condition in fs::create_dir_all
• No longer caching stdio on Windows
• Optimized insertion sort in slice insertion sort in some cases 2.50%~ faster and in one case now 12.50% faster.
• Optimized AtomicBool::fetch_nand

Stabilized APIs

• Child::try_wait
• HashMap::retain
• HashSet::retain
• PeekMut::pop
• TcpStream::peek
• UdpSocket::peek
• UdpSocket::peek_from

Cargo

• Added partial Pijul support Pijul is a version control system in Rust. You can now create new cargo projects with Pijul using cargo new --vcs pijul
• Now always emits build script warnings for crates that fail to build
• Added Android build support
• Added --bins and --tests flags now you can build all programs of a certain type, for example cargo build --bins will build all binaries.
• Added support for haiku

Misc

• rustdoc can now use pulldown-cmark with the --enable-commonmark flag
• Added rust-windbg script for better debugging on Windows
• Rust now uses the official cross compiler for NetBSD
• rustdoc now accepts # at the start of files
• Fixed jemalloc support for musl

Compatibility Notes

• Changes to how the 0 flag works in format! Padding zeroes are now always placed after the sign if it exists and before the digits. With the # flag the zeroes are placed after the prefix and before the digits.

• Due to the struct field optimisation, using transmute on structs that have no repr attribute or #[repr(Rust)] will no longer work. This has always been undefined behavior, but is now more likely to break in practice.

• The refactor of trait object type parsing fixed a bug where + was receiving the wrong priority parsing things like &for<'a> Tr<'a> + Send as &(for<'a> Tr<'a> + Send) instead of (&for<'a> Tr<'a>) + Send

• Overlapping inherent impls are now a hard error

• PartialOrd and Ord must agree on the ordering.

• rustc main.rs -o out --emit=asm,llvm-ir Now will output out.asm and out.ll instead of only one of the filetypes.

• calling a function that returns Self will no longer work when the size of Self cannot be statically determined.

• rustc now builds with a "pthreads" flavour of MinGW for Windows GNU this has caused a few regressions namely:

  • Changed the link order of local static/dynamic libraries (respecting the order on given rather than having the compiler reorder).
  • Changed how MinGW is linked, native code linked to dynamic libraries may require manually linking to the gcc support library (for the native code itself)

Version 1.17.0 (2017-04-27)

Language

• The lifetime of statics and consts defaults to 'static. RFC 1623
• Fields of structs may be initialized without duplicating the field/variable names. RFC 1682
• Self may be included in the where clause of impls. RFC 1647
• When coercing to an unsized type lifetimes must be equal. That is, there is no subtyping between T and U when T: Unsize<U>. For example, coercing &mut [&'a X; N] to &mut [&'b X] requires 'a be equal to 'b. Soundness fix.
• Values passed to the indexing operator, [], automatically coerce
• Static variables may contain references to other statics

Compiler

• Exit quickly on only --emit dep-info
• Make -C relocation-model more correctly determine whether the linker creates a position-independent executable
• Add -C overflow-checks to directly control whether integer overflow panics
• The rustc type checker now checks items on demand instead of in a single in-order pass. This is mostly an internal refactoring in support of future work, including incremental type checking, but also resolves RFC 1647, allowing Self to appear in impl where clauses.
• Optimize vtable loads
• Turn off vectorization for Emscripten targets
• Provide suggestions for unknown macros imported with use
• Fix ICEs in path resolution
• Strip exception handling code on Emscripten when panic=abort
• Add clearer error message using &str + &str

Stabilized APIs

• Arc::into_raw
• Arc::from_raw
• Arc::ptr_eq
• Rc::into_raw
• Rc::from_raw
• Rc::ptr_eq
• Ordering::then
• Ordering::then_with
• BTreeMap::range
• BTreeMap::range_mut
• collections::Bound
• process::abort
• ptr::read_unaligned
• ptr::write_unaligned
• Result::expect_err
• Cell::swap
• Cell::replace
• Cell::into_inner
• Cell::take

Libraries

• BTreeMap and BTreeSet can iterate over ranges
• Cell can store non-Copy types. RFC 1651
• String implements FromIterator<&char>
• Box implements a number of new conversions: From<Box<str>> for String, From<Box<[T]>> for Vec<T>, From<Box<CStr>> for CString, From<Box<OsStr>> for OsString, From<Box<Path>> for PathBuf, Into<Box<str>> for String, Into<Box<[T]>> for Vec<T>, Into<Box<CStr>> for CString, Into<Box<OsStr>> for OsString, Into<Box<Path>> for PathBuf, Default for Box<str>, Default for Box<CStr>, Default for Box<OsStr>, From<&CStr> for Box<CStr>, From<&OsStr> for Box<OsStr>, From<&Path> for Box<Path>
• ffi::FromBytesWithNulError implements Error and Display
• Specialize PartialOrd<A> for [A] where A: Ord
• Slightly optimize slice::sort
• Add ToString trait specialization for Cow<'a, str> and String
• Box<[T]> implements From<&[T]> where T: Copy, Box<str> implements From<&str>
• IpAddr implements From for various arrays. SocketAddr implements From<(I, u16)> where I: Into<IpAddr>
• format! estimates the needed capacity before writing a string
• Support unprivileged symlink creation in Windows
• PathBuf implements Default
• Implement PartialEq<[A]> for VecDeque<A>
• HashMap resizes adaptively to guard against DOS attacks and poor hash functions.

Cargo

• Add cargo check --all
• Add an option to ignore SSL revocation checking
• Add cargo run --package
• Add required_features
• Assume build.rs is a build script
• Find workspace via workspace_root link in containing member

Misc

• Documentation is rendered with mdbook instead of the obsolete, in-tree rustbook
• The "Unstable Book" documents nightly-only features
• Improve the style of the sidebar in rustdoc output
• Configure build correctly on 64-bit CPU's with the armhf ABI
• Fix MSP430 breakage due to i128
• Preliminary Solaris/SPARCv9 support
• rustc is linked statically on Windows MSVC targets, allowing it to run without installing the MSVC runtime.
• rustdoc --test includes file names in test names
• This release includes builds of std for sparc64-unknown-linux-gnu, aarch64-unknown-linux-fuchsia, and x86_64-unknown-linux-fuchsia.
• Initial support for aarch64-unknown-freebsd
• Initial support for i686-unknown-netbsd
• This release no longer includes the old makefile build system. Rust is built with a custom build system, written in Rust, and with Cargo.
• Add Debug implementations for libcollection structs
• TypeId implements PartialOrd and Ord
• --test-threads=0 produces an error
• rustup installs documentation by default
• The Rust source includes NatVis visualizations. These can be used by WinDbg and Visual Studio to improve the debugging experience.

Compatibility Notes

• Rust 1.17 does not correctly detect the MSVC 2017 linker. As a workaround, either use MSVC 2015 or run vcvars.bat.
• When coercing to an unsized type lifetimes must be equal. That is, disallow subtyping between T and U when T: Unsize<U>, e.g. coercing &mut [&'a X; N] to &mut [&'b X] requires 'a be equal to 'b. Soundness fix.
• format! and Display::to_string panic if an underlying formatting implementation returns an error. Previously the error was silently ignored. It is incorrect for write_fmt to return an error when writing to a string.
• In-tree crates are verified to be unstable. Previously, some minor crates were marked stable and could be accessed from the stable toolchain.
• Rust git source no longer includes vendored crates. Those that need to build with vendored crates should build from release tarballs.
• Fix inert attributes from proc_macro_derives
• During crate resolution, rustc prefers a crate in the sysroot if two crates are otherwise identical. Unlikely to be encountered outside the Rust build system.
• Fixed bugs around how type inference interacts with dead-code. The existing code generally ignores the type of dead-code unless a type-hint is provided; this can cause surprising inference interactions particularly around defaulting. The new code uniformly ignores the result type of dead-code.
• Tuple-struct constructors with private fields are no longer visible
• Lifetime parameters that do not appear in the arguments are now considered early-bound, resolving a soundness bug (#32330). The hr_lifetime_in_assoc_type future-compatibility lint has been in effect since April of 2016.
• rustdoc: fix doctests with non-feature crate attributes
• Make transmuting from fn item types to pointer-sized types a hard error

Version 1.16.0 (2017-03-16)

Language

• The compiler's dead_code lint now accounts for type aliases.
• Uninhabitable enums (those without any variants) no longer permit wildcard match patterns
• Clean up semantics of self in an import list
• Self may appear in impl headers
• Self may appear in struct expressions

Compiler

• rustc now supports --emit=metadata, which causes rustc to emit a .rmeta file containing only crate metadata. This can be used by tools like the Rust Language Service to perform metadata-only builds.
• Levenshtein based typo suggestions now work in most places, while previously they worked only for fields and sometimes for local variables. Together with the overhaul of "no resolution"/"unexpected resolution" errors (#38154) they result in large and systematic improvement in resolution diagnostics.
• Fix transmute::<T, U> where T requires a bigger alignment than U
• rustc: use -Xlinker when specifying an rpath with ',' in it
• rustc no longer attempts to provide "consider using an explicit lifetime" suggestions. They were inaccurate.

Stabilized APIs

• VecDeque::truncate
• VecDeque::resize
• String::insert_str
• Duration::checked_add
• Duration::checked_sub
• Duration::checked_div
• Duration::checked_mul
• str::replacen
• str::repeat
• SocketAddr::is_ipv4
• SocketAddr::is_ipv6
• IpAddr::is_ipv4
• IpAddr::is_ipv6
• Vec::dedup_by
• Vec::dedup_by_key
• Result::unwrap_or_default
• <*const T>::wrapping_offset
• <*mut T>::wrapping_offset
• CommandExt::creation_flags
• File::set_permissions
• String::split_off

Libraries

• [T]::binary_search and [T]::binary_search_by_key now take their argument by Borrow parameter
• All public types in std implement Debug
• IpAddr implements From<Ipv4Addr> and From<Ipv6Addr>
• Ipv6Addr implements From<[u16; 8]>
• Ctrl-Z returns from Stdin.read() when reading from the console on Windows
• std: Fix partial writes in LineWriter
• std: Clamp max read/write sizes on Unix
• Use more specific panic message for &str slicing errors
• TcpListener::set_only_v6 is deprecated. This functionality cannot be achieved in std currently.
• writeln!, like println!, now accepts a form with no string or formatting arguments, to just print a newline
• Implement iter::Sum and iter::Product for Result
• Reduce the size of static data in std_unicode::tables
• char::EscapeDebug, EscapeDefault, EscapeUnicode, CaseMappingIter, ToLowercase, ToUppercase, implement Display
• Duration implements Sum
• String implements ToSocketAddrs

Cargo

• The cargo check command does a type check of a project without building it
• crates.io will display CI badges from Travis and AppVeyor, if specified in Cargo.toml
• crates.io will display categories listed in Cargo.toml
• Compilation profiles accept integer values for debug, in addition to true and false. These are passed to rustc as the value to -C debuginfo
• Implement cargo --version --verbose
• All builds now output 'dep-info' build dependencies compatible with make and ninja
• Build all workspace members with build --all
• Document all workspace members with doc --all
• Path deps outside workspace are not members

Misc

• rustdoc has a --sysroot argument that, like rustc, specifies the path to the Rust implementation
• The armv7-linux-androideabi target no longer enables NEON extensions, per Google's ABI guide
• The stock standard library can be compiled for Redox OS
• Rust has initial SPARC support. Tier 3. No builds available.
• Rust has experimental support for Nvidia PTX. Tier 3. No builds available.
• Fix backtraces on i686-pc-windows-gnu by disabling FPO

Compatibility Notes

• Uninhabitable enums (those without any variants) no longer permit wildcard match patterns
• In this release, references to uninhabited types can not be pattern-matched. This was accidentally allowed in 1.15.
• The compiler's dead_code lint now accounts for type aliases.
• Ctrl-Z returns from Stdin.read() when reading from the console on Windows
• Clean up semantics of self in an import list
• Reimplemented lifetime elision. This change was almost entirely compatible with existing code, but it did close a number of small bugs and loopholes, as well as being more accepting in some other cases.

Version 1.15.1 (2017-02-09)

• Fix IntoIter::as_mut_slice's signature
• Compile compiler builtins with -fPIC on 32-bit platforms

Version 1.15.0 (2017-02-02)

Language

• Basic procedural macros allowing custom #[derive], aka "macros 1.1", are stable. This allows popular code-generating crates like Serde and Diesel to work ergonomically. RFC 1681.
• Tuple structs may be empty. Unary and empty tuple structs may be instantiated with curly braces. Part of RFC 1506.
• A number of minor changes to name resolution have been activated. They add up to more consistent semantics, allowing for future evolution of Rust macros. Specified in RFC 1560, see its section on "changes" for details of what is different. The breaking changes here have been transitioned through the legacy_imports lint since 1.14, with no known regressions.
• In macro_rules, path fragments can now be parsed as type parameter bounds
• ?Sized can be used in where clauses
• There is now a limit on the size of monomorphized types and it can be modified with the #![type_size_limit] crate attribute, similarly to the #![recursion_limit] attribute

Compiler

• On Windows, the compiler will apply dllimport attributes when linking to extern functions. Additional attributes and flags can control which library kind is linked and its name. RFC 1717.
• Rust-ABI symbols are no longer exported from cdylibs
• The --test flag works with procedural macro crates
• Fix extern "aapcs" fn ABI
• The -C no-stack-check flag is deprecated. It does nothing.
• The format! expander recognizes incorrect printf and shell-style formatting directives and suggests the correct format.
• Only report one error for all unused imports in an import list

Compiler Performance

• Avoid unnecessary mk_ty calls in Ty::super_fold_with
• Avoid more unnecessary mk_ty calls in Ty::super_fold_with
• Don't clone in UnificationTable::probe
• Remove scope_auxiliary to cut RSS by 10%
• Use small vectors in type walker
• Macro expansion performance was improved
• Change HirVec<P<T>> to HirVec<T> in hir::Expr
• Replace FNV with a faster hash function

Stabilized APIs

• std::iter::Iterator::min_by
• std::iter::Iterator::max_by
• std::os::*::fs::FileExt
• std::sync::atomic::Atomic*::get_mut
• std::sync::atomic::Atomic*::into_inner
• std::vec::IntoIter::as_slice
• std::vec::IntoIter::as_mut_slice
• std::sync::mpsc::Receiver::try_iter
• std::os::unix::process::CommandExt::before_exec
• std::rc::Rc::strong_count
• std::rc::Rc::weak_count
• std::sync::Arc::strong_count
• std::sync::Arc::weak_count
• std::char::encode_utf8
• std::char::encode_utf16
• std::cell::Ref::clone
• std::io::Take::into_inner

Libraries

• The standard sorting algorithm has been rewritten for dramatic performance improvements. It is a hybrid merge sort, drawing influences from Timsort. Previously it was a naive merge sort.
• Iterator::nth no longer has a Sized bound
• Extend<&T> is specialized for Vec where T: Copy to improve performance.
• chars().count() is much faster and so are chars().last() and char_indices().last()
• Fix ARM Objective-C ABI in std::env::args
• Chinese characters display correctly in fmt::Debug
• Derive Default for Duration
• Support creation of anonymous pipes on WinXP/2k
• mpsc::RecvTimeoutError implements Error
• Don't pass overlapped handles to processes

Cargo

• In this release, Cargo build scripts no longer have access to the OUT_DIR environment variable at build time via env!("OUT_DIR"). They should instead check the variable at runtime with std::env. That the value was set at build time was a bug, and incorrect when cross-compiling. This change is known to cause breakage.
• Add --all flag to cargo test
• Compile statically against the MSVC CRT
• Mix feature flags into fingerprint/metadata shorthash
• Link OpenSSL statically on OSX
• Apply new fingerprinting to build dir outputs
• Test for bad path overrides with summaries
• Require cargo install --vers to take a semver version
• Fix retrying crate downloads for network errors
• Implement string lookup for build.rustflags config key
• Emit more info on --message-format=json
• Assume build.rs in the same directory as Cargo.toml is a build script
• Don't ignore errors in workspace manifest
• Fix --message-format JSON when rustc emits non-JSON warnings

Tooling

• Test runners (binaries built with --test) now support a --list argument that lists the tests it contains
• Test runners now support a --exact argument that makes the test filter match exactly, instead of matching only a substring of the test name
• rustdoc supports a --playground-url flag
• rustdoc provides more details about #[should_panic] errors

Misc

• The Rust build system is now written in Rust. The Makefiles may continue to be used in this release by passing --disable-rustbuild to the configure script, but they will be deleted soon. Note that the new build system uses a different on-disk layout that will likely affect any scripts building Rust.
• Rust supports i686-unknown-openbsd. Tier 3 support. No testing or releases.
• Rust supports the MSP430. Tier 3 support. No testing or releases.
• Rust supports the ARMv5TE architecture. Tier 3 support. No testing or releases.

Compatibility Notes

• A number of minor changes to name resolution have been activated. They add up to more consistent semantics, allowing for future evolution of Rust macros. Specified in RFC 1560, see its section on "changes" for details of what is different. The breaking changes here have been transitioned through the legacy_imports lint since 1.14, with no known regressions.
• In this release, Cargo build scripts no longer have access to the OUT_DIR environment variable at build time via env!("OUT_DIR"). They should instead check the variable at runtime with std::env. That the value was set at build time was a bug, and incorrect when cross-compiling. This change is known to cause breakage.
• Higher-ranked lifetimes are no longer allowed to appear only in associated types. The hr_lifetime_in_assoc_type lint has been a warning since 1.10 and is now an error by default. It will become a hard error in the near future.
• The semantics relating modules to file system directories are changing in minor ways. This is captured in the new legacy_directory_ownership lint, which is a warning in this release, and will become a hard error in the future.
• Rust-ABI symbols are no longer exported from cdylibs
• Once Peekable peeks a None it will return that None without re-querying the underlying iterator

Version 1.14.0 (2016-12-22)

Language

• .. matches multiple tuple fields in enum variants, structs and tuples. RFC 1492.
• Safe fn items can be coerced to unsafe fn pointers
• use * and use ::* both glob-import from the crate root
• It's now possible to call a Vec<Box<Fn()>> without explicit dereferencing

Compiler

• Mark enums with non-zero discriminant as non-zero
• Lower-case static mut names are linted like other statics and consts
• Fix ICE on some macros in const integer positions (e.g. [u8; m!()])
• Improve error message and snippet for "did you mean x"
• Add a panic-strategy field to the target specification
• Include LLVM version in --version --verbose

Compile-time Optimizations

• Improve macro expansion performance
• Shrink Expr_::ExprInlineAsm
• Replace all uses of SHA-256 with BLAKE2b
• Reduce the number of bytes hashed by IchHasher
• Avoid more allocations when compiling html5ever
• Use SmallVector in CombineFields::instantiate
• Avoid some allocations in the macro parser
• Use a faster deflate setting
• Add ArrayVec and AccumulateVec to reduce heap allocations during interning of slices
• Optimize write_metadata
• Don't process obligation forest cycles when stalled
• Avoid many CrateConfig clones
• Optimize Substs::super_fold_with
• Optimize ObligationForest's NodeState handling
• Speed up plug_leaks

Libraries

• println!(), with no arguments, prints newline. Previously, an empty string was required to achieve the same.
• Wrapping impls standard binary and unary operators, as well as the Sum and Product iterators
• Implement From<Cow<str>> for String and From<Cow<[T]>> for Vec<T>
• Improve fold performance for chain, cloned, map, and VecDeque iterators
• Improve SipHasher performance on small values
• Add Iterator trait TrustedLen to enable better FromIterator / Extend
• Expand .zip() specialization to .map() and .cloned()
• ReadDir implements Debug
• Implement RefUnwindSafe for atomic types
• Specialize Vec::extend to Vec::extend_from_slice
• Avoid allocations in Decoder::read_str
• io::Error implements From<io::ErrorKind>
• Impl Debug for raw pointers to unsized data
• Don't reuse HashMap random seeds
• The internal memory layout of HashMap is more cache-friendly, for significant improvements in some operations
• HashMap uses less memory on 32-bit architectures
• Impl Add<{str, Cow<str>}> for Cow<str>

Cargo

• Expose rustc cfg values to build scripts
• Allow cargo to work with read-only CARGO_HOME
• Fix passing --features when testing multiple packages
• Use a single profile set per workspace
• Load replace sections from lock files
• Ignore panic configuration for test/bench profiles

Tooling

• rustup is the recommended Rust installation method
• This release includes host (rustc) builds for Linux on MIPS, PowerPC, and S390x. These are tier 2 platforms and may have major defects. Follow the instructions on the website to install, or add the targets to an existing installation with rustup target add. The new target triples are:
  • mips-unknown-linux-gnu
  • mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu
  • mips64-unknown-linux-gnuabi64
  • mips64el-unknown-linux-gnuabi64
  • powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
  • powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu
  • powerpc64le-unknown-linux-gnu
  • s390x-unknown-linux-gnu
• This release includes target (std) builds for ARM Linux running MUSL libc. These are tier 2 platforms and may have major defects. Add the following triples to an existing rustup installation with rustup target add:
  • arm-unknown-linux-musleabi
  • arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf
  • armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
• This release includes experimental support for WebAssembly, via the wasm32-unknown-emscripten target. This target is known to have major defects. Please test, report, and fix.
• rustup no longer installs documentation by default. Run rustup component add rust-docs to install.
• Fix line stepping in debugger
• Enable line number debuginfo in releases

Misc

• Disable jemalloc on aarch64/powerpc/mips
• Add support for Fuchsia OS
• Detect local-rebuild by only MAJOR.MINOR version

Compatibility Notes

• A number of forward-compatibility lints used by the compiler to gradually introduce language changes have been converted to deny by default:
  • "use of inaccessible extern crate erroneously allowed"
  • "type parameter default erroneously allowed in invalid location"
  • "detects super or self keywords at the beginning of global path"
  • "two overlapping inherent impls define an item with the same name were erroneously allowed"
  • "floating-point constants cannot be used in patterns"
  • "constants of struct or enum type can only be used in a pattern if the struct or enum has #[derive(PartialEq, Eq)]"
  • "lifetimes or labels named '_ were erroneously allowed"
• Prohibit patterns in trait methods without bodies
• The atomic Ordering enum may not be matched exhaustively
• Future-proofing #[no_link] breaks some obscure cases
• The $crate macro variable is accepted in fewer locations
• Impls specifying extra region requirements beyond the trait they implement are rejected
• Enums may not be unsized. Unsized enums are intended to work but never have. For now they are forbidden.
• Enforce the shadowing restrictions from RFC 1560 for today's macros

Version 1.13.0 (2016-11-10)

Language

• Stabilize the ? operator. ? is a simple way to propagate errors, like the try! macro, described in RFC 0243.
• Stabilize macros in type position. Described in RFC 873.
• Stabilize attributes on statements. Described in RFC 0016.
• Fix #[derive] for empty tuple structs/variants
• Fix lifetime rules for 'if' conditions
• Avoid loading and parsing unconfigured non-inline modules

Compiler

• Add the -C link-arg argument
• Remove the old AST-based backend from rustc_trans
• Don't enable NEON by default on armv7 Linux
• Fix debug line number info for macro expansions
• Do not emit "class method" debuginfo for types that are not DICompositeType
• Warn about multiple conflicting #[repr] hints
• When sizing DST, don't double-count nested struct prefixes
• Default RUST_MIN_STACK to 16MiB for now
• Improve rlib metadata format. Reduces rlib size significantly.
• Reject macros with empty repetitions to avoid infinite loop
• Expand macros without recursing to avoid stack overflows

Diagnostics

• Replace macro backtraces with labeled local uses
• Improve error message for misplaced doc comments
• Buffer unix and lock windows to prevent message interleaving
• Update lifetime errors to specifically note temporaries
• Special case a few colors for Windows
• Suggest use self when such an import resolves
• Be more specific when type parameter shadows primitive type
• Many minor improvements

Compile-time Optimizations

• Compute and cache HIR hashes at beginning
• Don't hash types in loan paths
• Cache projections in trans
• Optimize the parser's last token handling
• Only instantiate #[inline] functions in codegen units referencing them. This leads to big improvements in cases where crates export define many inline functions without using them directly.
• Lazily allocate TypedArena's first chunk
• Don't allocate during default HashSet creation

Stabilized APIs

• checked_abs
• wrapping_abs
• overflowing_abs
• RefCell::try_borrow
• RefCell::try_borrow_mut

Libraries

• Add assert_ne! and debug_assert_ne!
• Make vec_deque::Drain, hash_map::Drain, and hash_set::Drain covariant
• Implement AsRef<[T]> for std::slice::Iter
• Implement Debug for std::vec::IntoIter
• CString: avoid excessive growth just to 0-terminate
• Implement CoerceUnsized for {Cell, RefCell, UnsafeCell}
• Use arc4rand on FreeBSD
• memrchr: Correct aligned offset computation
• Improve Demangling of Rust Symbols
• Use monotonic time in condition variables
• Implement Debug for std::path::{Components,Iter}
• Implement conversion traits for char
• Fix illegal instruction caused by overflow in channel cloning
• Zero first byte of CString on drop
• Inherit overflow checks for sum and product
• Add missing Eq implementations
• Implement Debug for DirEntry
• When getaddrinfo returns EAI_SYSTEM retrieve actual error from errno
• SipHasher is deprecated. Use DefaultHasher.
• Implement more traits for std::io::ErrorKind
• Optimize BinaryHeap bounds checking
• Work around pointer aliasing issue in Vec::extend_from_slice, extend_with_element
• Fix overflow checking in unsigned pow()

Cargo

• This release includes security fixes to both curl and OpenSSL.
• Fix transitive doctests when panic=abort
• Add --all-features flag to cargo
• Reject path-based dependencies in cargo package
• Don't parse the home directory more than once
• Don't try to generate Cargo.lock on empty workspaces
• Update OpenSSL to 1.0.2j
• Add license and license_file to cargo metadata output
• Make crates-io registry URL optional in config; ignore all changes to source.crates-io
• Don't download dependencies from other platforms
• Build transitive dev-dependencies when needed
• Add support for per-target rustflags in .cargo/config
• Avoid updating registry when adding existing deps
• Warn about path overrides that won't work
• Use workspaces during cargo install
• Leak mspdbsrv.exe processes on Windows
• Add --message-format flag
• Pass target environment for rustdoc
• Use CommandExt::exec for cargo run on Unix
• Update curl and curl-sys
• Call rustdoc test with the correct cfg flags of a package

Tooling

• rustdoc: Add the --sysroot argument
• rustdoc: Fix a couple of issues with the search results
• rustdoc: remove the ! from macro URLs and titles
• gdb: Fix pretty-printing special-cased Rust types
• rustdoc: Filter more incorrect methods inherited through Deref

Misc

• Remove unmaintained style guide
• Add s390x support
• Initial work at Haiku OS support
• Add mips-uclibc targets
• Crate-ify compiler-rt into compiler-builtins
• Add rustc version info (git hash + date) to dist tarball
• Many documentation improvements

Compatibility Notes

• SipHasher is deprecated. Use DefaultHasher.
• Deny (by default) transmuting from fn item types to pointer-sized types. Continuing the long transition to zero-sized fn items, per RFC 401.
• Fix #[derive] for empty tuple structs/variants. Part of RFC 1506.
• Issue deprecation warnings for safe accesses to extern statics
• Fix lifetime rules for 'if' conditions.
• Inherit overflow checks for sum and product.
• Forbid user-defined macros named "macro_rules".

Version 1.12.1 (2016-10-20)

Regression Fixes

• ICE: 'rustc' panicked at 'assertion failed: concrete_substs.is_normalized_for_trans()' #36381
• Confusion with double negation and booleans
• rustc 1.12.0 fails with SIGSEGV in release mode (syn crate 0.8.0)
• Rustc 1.12.0 Windows build of ethcore crate fails with LLVM error
• 1.12.0: High memory usage when linking in release mode with debug info
• Corrupted memory after updated to 1.12
• "Let NullaryConstructor = something;" causes internal compiler error: "tried to overwrite interned AdtDef"
• Fix ICE: inject bitcast if types mismatch for invokes/calls/stores
• debuginfo: Handle spread_arg case in MIR-trans in a more stable way.

Version 1.12.0 (2016-09-29)

Highlights

• rustc translates code to LLVM IR via its own "middle" IR (MIR). This translation pass is far simpler than the previous AST->LLVM pass, and creates opportunities to perform new optimizations directly on the MIR. It was previously described on the Rust blog.
• rustc presents a new, more readable error format, along with machine-readable JSON error output for use by IDEs. Most common editors supporting Rust have been updated to work with it. It was previously described on the Rust blog.

Compiler

• rustc translates code to LLVM IR via its own "middle" IR (MIR). This translation pass is far simpler than the previous AST->LLVM pass, and creates opportunities to perform new optimizations directly on the MIR. It was previously described on the Rust blog.
• Print the Rust target name, not the LLVM target name, with --print target-list
• The computation of TypeId is correct in some cases where it was previously producing inconsistent results
• The mips-unknown-linux-gnu target uses hardware floating point by default
• The rustc arguments, --print target-cpus, --print target-features, --print relocation-models, and --print code-models print the available options to the -C target-cpu, -C target-feature, -C relocation-model and -C code-model code generation arguments
• rustc supports three new MUSL targets on ARM: arm-unknown-linux-musleabi, arm-unknown-linux-musleabihf, and armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf. These targets produce statically-linked binaries. There are no binary release builds yet though.

Diagnostics

• rustc presents a new, more readable error format, along with machine-readable JSON error output for use by IDEs. Most common editors supporting Rust have been updated to work with it. It was previously described on the Rust blog.
• In error descriptions, references are now described in plain English, instead of as "&-ptr"
• In error type descriptions, unknown numeric types are named {integer} or {float} instead of _
• rustc emits a clearer error when inner attributes follow a doc comment

Language

• macro_rules! invocations can be made within macro_rules! invocations
• macro_rules! meta-variables are hygienic
• macro_rules! tt matchers can be reparsed correctly, making them much more useful
• macro_rules! stmt matchers correctly consume the entire contents when inside non-braces invocations
• Semicolons are properly required as statement delimiters inside macro_rules! invocations
• cfg_attr works on path attributes

Stabilized APIs

• Cell::as_ptr
• RefCell::as_ptr
• IpAddr::is_unspecified
• IpAddr::is_loopback
• IpAddr::is_multicast
• Ipv4Addr::is_unspecified
• Ipv6Addr::octets
• LinkedList::contains
• VecDeque::contains
• ExitStatusExt::from_raw. Both on Unix and Windows.
• Receiver::recv_timeout
• RecvTimeoutError
• BinaryHeap::peek_mut
• PeekMut
• iter::Product
• iter::Sum
• OccupiedEntry::remove_entry
• VacantEntry::into_key

Libraries

• The format! macro and friends now allow a single argument to be formatted in multiple styles
• The lifetime bounds on [T]::binary_search_by and [T]::binary_search_by_key have been adjusted to be more flexible
• Option implements From for its contained type
• Cell, RefCell and UnsafeCell implement From for their contained type
• RwLock panics if the reader count overflows
• vec_deque::Drain, hash_map::Drain and hash_set::Drain are covariant
• vec::Drain and binary_heap::Drain are covariant
• Cow<str> implements FromIterator for char, &str and String
• Sockets on Linux are correctly closed in subprocesses via SOCK_CLOEXEC
• hash_map::Entry, hash_map::VacantEntry and hash_map::OccupiedEntry implement Debug
• btree_map::Entry, btree_map::VacantEntry and btree_map::OccupiedEntry implement Debug
• String implements AddAssign
• Variadic extern fn pointers implement the Clone, PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord, Hash, fmt::Pointer, and fmt::Debug traits
• FileType implements Debug
• References to Mutex and RwLock are unwind-safe
• mpsc::sync_channel Receivers return any available message before reporting a disconnect
• Unicode definitions have been updated to 9.0
• env iterators implement DoubleEndedIterator

Cargo

• Support local mirrors of registries
• Add support for command aliases
• Allow opt-level="s" / opt-level="z" in profile overrides
• Make cargo doc --open --target work as expected
• Speed up noop registry updates
• Update OpenSSL
• Fix --panic=abort with plugins
• Always pass -C metadata to the compiler
• Fix depending on git repos with workspaces
• Add a --lib flag to cargo new
• Add http.cainfo for custom certs
• Indicate the compilation profile after compiling
• Allow enabling features for dependencies with --features
• Add --jobs flag to cargo package
• Add --dry-run to cargo publish
• Add support for RUSTDOCFLAGS

Performance

• panic::catch_unwind is more optimized
• panic::catch_unwind no longer accesses thread-local storage on entry

Tooling

• Test binaries now support a --test-threads argument to specify the number of threads used to run tests, and which acts the same as the RUST_TEST_THREADS environment variable
• The test runner now emits a warning when tests run over 60 seconds
• rustdoc: Fix methods in search results
• rust-lldb warns about unsupported versions of LLDB
• Rust releases now come with source packages that can be installed by rustup via rustup component add rust-src. The resulting source code can be used by tools and IDES, located in the sysroot under lib/rustlib/src.

Misc

• The compiler can now be built against LLVM 3.9
• Many minor improvements to the documentation.
• The Rust exception handling "personality" routine is now written in Rust

Compatibility Notes

• When printing Windows OsStrs, unpaired surrogate codepoints are escaped with the lowercase format instead of the uppercase
• When formatting strings, if "precision" is specified, the "fill", "align" and "width" specifiers are no longer ignored
• The Debug impl for strings no longer escapes all non-ASCII characters

Version 1.11.0 (2016-08-18)

Language

• cfg_attr works on path attributes
• Support nested cfg_attr attributes
• Allow statement-generating braced macro invocations at the end of blocks
• Macros can be expanded inside of trait definitions
• #[macro_use] works properly when it is itself expanded from a macro

Stabilized APIs

• BinaryHeap::append
• BTreeMap::append
• BTreeMap::split_off
• BTreeSet::append
• BTreeSet::split_off
• f32::to_degrees (in libcore - previously stabilized in libstd)
• f32::to_radians (in libcore - previously stabilized in libstd)
• f64::to_degrees (in libcore - previously stabilized in libstd)
• f64::to_radians (in libcore - previously stabilized in libstd)
• Iterator::sum
• Iterator::product
• Cell::get_mut
• RefCell::get_mut

Libraries

• The thread_local! macro supports multiple definitions in a single invocation, and can apply attributes
• Cow implements Default
• Wrapping implements binary, octal, lower-hex and upper-hex Display formatting
• The range types implement Hash
• lookup_host ignores unknown address types
• assert_eq! accepts a custom error message, like assert! does
• The main thread is now called "main" instead of "<main>"

Cargo

• Disallow specifying features of transitive deps
• Add color support for Windows consoles
• Fix harness = false on [lib] sections
• Don't panic when links contains a '.'
• Build scripts can emit warnings, and -vv prints warnings for all crates.
• Ignore file locks on OS X NFS mounts
• Don't warn about package.metadata keys. This provides room for expansion by arbitrary tools.
• Add support for cdylib crate types
• Prevent publishing crates when files are dirty
• Don't fetch all crates on clean
• Propagate --color option to rustc
• Fix cargo doc --open on Windows
• Improve autocompletion
• Configure colors of stderr as well as stdout

Performance

• Caching projections speeds up type check dramatically for some workloads
• The default HashMap hasher is SipHash 1-3 instead of SipHash 2-4 This hasher is faster, but is believed to provide sufficient protection from collision attacks.
• Comparison of Ipv4Addr is 10x faster

Rustdoc

• Fix empty implementation section on some module pages
• Fix inlined renamed re-exports in import lists
• Fix search result layout for enum variants and struct fields
• Fix issues with source links to external crates
• Fix redirect pages for renamed re-exports

Tooling

• rustc is better at finding the MSVC toolchain
• When emitting debug info, rustc emits frame pointers for closures, shims and glue, as it does for all other functions
• rust-lldb warns about unsupported versions of LLDB
• Many more errors have been given error codes and extended explanations
• API documentation continues to be improved, with many new examples

Misc

• rustc no longer hangs when dependencies recursively re-export submodules
• rustc requires LLVM 3.7+
• The 'How Safe and Unsafe Interact' chapter of The Rustonomicon was rewritten
• rustc support 16-bit pointer sizes. No targets use this yet, but it works toward AVR support.

Compatibility Notes

• consts and statics may not have unsized types
• The new follow-set rules that place restrictions on macro_rules! in order to ensure syntax forward-compatibility have been enabled This was an amendment to RFC 550, and has been a warning since 1.10.
• cfg attribute process has been refactored to fix various bugs. This causes breakage in some corner cases.

Version 1.10.0 (2016-07-07)

Language

• Allow concat_idents! in type positions as well as in expression positions.
• Copy types are required to have a trivial implementation of Clone. RFC 1521.
• Single-variant enums support the #[repr(..)] attribute.
• Fix #[derive(RustcEncodable)] in the presence of other encode methods.
• panic! can be converted to a runtime abort with the -C panic=abort flag. RFC 1513.
• Add a new crate type, 'cdylib'. cdylibs are dynamic libraries suitable for loading by non-Rust hosts. RFC 1510. Note that Cargo does not yet directly support cdylibs.

Stabilized APIs

• os::windows::fs::OpenOptionsExt::access_mode
• os::windows::fs::OpenOptionsExt::share_mode
• os::windows::fs::OpenOptionsExt::custom_flags
• os::windows::fs::OpenOptionsExt::attributes
• os::windows::fs::OpenOptionsExt::security_qos_flags
• os::unix::fs::OpenOptionsExt::custom_flags
• sync::Weak::new
• Default for sync::Weak
• panic::set_hook
• panic::take_hook
• panic::PanicInfo
• panic::PanicInfo::payload
• panic::PanicInfo::location
• panic::Location
• panic::Location::file
• panic::Location::line
• ffi::CStr::from_bytes_with_nul
• ffi::CStr::from_bytes_with_nul_unchecked
• ffi::FromBytesWithNulError
• fs::Metadata::modified
• fs::Metadata::accessed
• fs::Metadata::created
• sync::atomic::Atomic{Usize,Isize,Bool,Ptr}::compare_exchange
• sync::atomic::Atomic{Usize,Isize,Bool,Ptr}::compare_exchange_weak
• collections::{btree,hash}_map::{Occupied,Vacant,}Entry::key
• os::unix::net::{UnixStream, UnixListener, UnixDatagram, SocketAddr}
• SocketAddr::is_unnamed
• SocketAddr::as_pathname
• UnixStream::connect
• UnixStream::pair
• UnixStream::try_clone
• UnixStream::local_addr
• UnixStream::peer_addr
• UnixStream::set_read_timeout
• UnixStream::set_write_timeout
• UnixStream::read_timeout
• UnixStream::write_timeout
• UnixStream::set_nonblocking
• UnixStream::take_error
• UnixStream::shutdown
• Read/Write/RawFd impls for UnixStream
• UnixListener::bind
• UnixListener::accept
• UnixListener::try_clone
• UnixListener::local_addr
• UnixListener::set_nonblocking
• UnixListener::take_error
• UnixListener::incoming
• RawFd impls for UnixListener
• UnixDatagram::bind
• UnixDatagram::unbound
• UnixDatagram::pair
• UnixDatagram::connect
• UnixDatagram::try_clone
• UnixDatagram::local_addr
• UnixDatagram::peer_addr
• UnixDatagram::recv_from
• UnixDatagram::recv
• UnixDatagram::send_to
• UnixDatagram::send
• UnixDatagram::set_read_timeout
• UnixDatagram::set_write_timeout
• UnixDatagram::read_timeout
• UnixDatagram::write_timeout
• UnixDatagram::set_nonblocking
• UnixDatagram::take_error
• UnixDatagram::shutdown
• RawFd impls for UnixDatagram
• {BTree,Hash}Map::values_mut
• <[_]>::binary_search_by_key

Libraries

• The abs_sub method of floats is deprecated. The semantics of this minor method are subtle and probably not what most people want.
• Add implementation of Ord for Cell and RefCell where T: Ord.
• On Linux, if HashMaps can't be initialized with getrandom they will fall back to /dev/urandom temporarily to avoid blocking during early boot.
• Implemented negation for wrapping numerals.
• Implement Clone for binary_heap::IntoIter.
• Implement Display and Hash for std::num::Wrapping.
• Add Default implementation for &CStr, CString.
• Implement From<Vec<T>> and Into<Vec<T>> for VecDeque<T>.
• Implement Default for UnsafeCell, fmt::Error, Condvar, Mutex, RwLock.

Cargo

• Cargo.toml supports the profile.*.panic option. This controls the runtime behavior of the panic! macro and can be either "unwind" (the default), or "abort". RFC 1513.
• Don't throw away errors with -p arguments.
• Report status to stderr instead of stdout.
• Build scripts are passed a CARGO_MANIFEST_LINKS environment variable that corresponds to the links field of the manifest.
• Ban keywords from crate names.
• Canonicalize CARGO_HOME on Windows.
• Retry network requests. By default they are retried twice, which can be customized with the net.retry value in .cargo/config.
• Don't print extra error info for failing subcommands.
• Add --force flag to cargo install.
• Don't use flock on NFS mounts.
• Prefer building cargo install artifacts in temporary directories. Makes it possible to install multiple crates in parallel.
• Add cargo test --doc.
• Add cargo --explain.
• Don't print warnings when -q is passed.
• Add cargo doc --lib and --bin.
• Don't require build script output to be UTF-8.
• Correctly attempt multiple git usernames.

Performance

• rustc memory usage was reduced by refactoring the context used for type checking.
• Speed up creation of HashMaps by caching the random keys used to initialize the hash state.
• The find implementation for Chain iterators is 2x faster.
• Trait selection optimizations speed up type checking by 15%.
• Efficient trie lookup for boolean Unicode properties. 10x faster than the previous lookup tables.
• Special case #[derive(Copy, Clone)] to avoid bloat.

Usability

• Many incremental improvements to documentation and rustdoc.
• rustdoc: List blanket trait impls.
• rustdoc: Clean up ABI rendering.
• Indexing with the wrong type produces a more informative error.
• Improve diagnostics for constants being used in irrefutable patterns.
• When many method candidates are in scope limit the suggestions to 10.
• Remove confusing suggestion when calling a fn type.
• Do not suggest changing &mut self to &mut mut self.

Misc

• Update i686-linux-android features to match Android ABI.
• Update aarch64-linux-android features to match Android ABI.
• std no longer prints backtraces on platforms where the running module must be loaded with env::current_exe, which can't be relied on.
• This release includes std binaries for the i586-unknown-linux-gnu, i686-unknown-linux-musl, and armv7-linux-androideabi targets. The i586 target is for old x86 hardware without SSE2, and the armv7 target is for Android running on modern ARM architectures.
• The rust-gdb and rust-lldb scripts are distributed on all Unix platforms.
• On Unix the runtime aborts by calling libc::abort instead of generating an illegal instruction.
• Rust is now bootstrapped from the previous release of Rust, instead of a snapshot from an arbitrary commit.

Compatibility Notes

• AtomicBool is now bool-sized, not word-sized.
• target_env for Linux ARM targets is just gnu, not gnueabihf, gnueabi, etc.
• Consistently panic on overflow in Duration::new.
• Change String::truncate to panic less.
• Add :block to the follow set for :ty and :path. Affects how macros are parsed.
• Fix macro hygiene bug.
• Feature-gated attributes on macro-generated macro invocations are now rejected.
• Suppress fallback and ambiguity errors during type inference. This caused some minor changes to type inference.

Version 1.9.0 (2016-05-26)

Language

• The #[deprecated] attribute when applied to an API will generate warnings when used. The warnings may be suppressed with #[allow(deprecated)]. RFC 1270.
• fn item types are zero sized, and each fn names a unique type. This will break code that transmutes fns, so calling transmute on a fn type will generate a warning for a few cycles, then will be converted to an error.
• Field and method resolution understand visibility, so private fields and methods cannot prevent the proper use of public fields and methods.
• The parser considers unicode codepoints in the PATTERN_WHITE_SPACE category to be whitespace.

Stabilized APIs

• std::panic
• std::panic::catch_unwind (renamed from recover)
• std::panic::resume_unwind (renamed from propagate)
• std::panic::AssertUnwindSafe (renamed from AssertRecoverSafe)
• std::panic::UnwindSafe (renamed from RecoverSafe)
• str::is_char_boundary
• <*const T>::as_ref
• <*mut T>::as_ref
• <*mut T>::as_mut
• AsciiExt::make_ascii_uppercase
• AsciiExt::make_ascii_lowercase
• char::decode_utf16
• char::DecodeUtf16
• char::DecodeUtf16Error
• char::DecodeUtf16Error::unpaired_surrogate
• BTreeSet::take
• BTreeSet::replace
• BTreeSet::get
• HashSet::take
• HashSet::replace
• HashSet::get
• OsString::with_capacity
• OsString::clear
• OsString::capacity
• OsString::reserve
• OsString::reserve_exact
• OsStr::is_empty
• OsStr::len
• std::os::unix::thread
• RawPthread
• JoinHandleExt
• JoinHandleExt::as_pthread_t
• JoinHandleExt::into_pthread_t
• HashSet::hasher
• HashMap::hasher
• CommandExt::exec
• File::try_clone
• SocketAddr::set_ip
• SocketAddr::set_port
• SocketAddrV4::set_ip
• SocketAddrV4::set_port
• SocketAddrV6::set_ip
• SocketAddrV6::set_port
• SocketAddrV6::set_flowinfo
• SocketAddrV6::set_scope_id
• slice::copy_from_slice
• ptr::read_volatile
• ptr::write_volatile
• OpenOptions::create_new
• TcpStream::set_nodelay
• TcpStream::nodelay
• TcpStream::set_ttl
• TcpStream::ttl
• TcpStream::set_only_v6
• TcpStream::only_v6
• TcpStream::take_error
• TcpStream::set_nonblocking
• TcpListener::set_ttl
• TcpListener::ttl
• TcpListener::set_only_v6
• TcpListener::only_v6
• TcpListener::take_error
• TcpListener::set_nonblocking
• UdpSocket::set_broadcast
• UdpSocket::broadcast
• UdpSocket::set_multicast_loop_v4
• UdpSocket::multicast_loop_v4
• UdpSocket::set_multicast_ttl_v4
• UdpSocket::multicast_ttl_v4
• UdpSocket::set_multicast_loop_v6
• UdpSocket::multicast_loop_v6
• UdpSocket::set_multicast_ttl_v6
• UdpSocket::multicast_ttl_v6
• UdpSocket::set_ttl
• UdpSocket::ttl
• UdpSocket::set_only_v6
• UdpSocket::only_v6
• UdpSocket::join_multicast_v4
• UdpSocket::join_multicast_v6
• UdpSocket::leave_multicast_v4
• UdpSocket::leave_multicast_v6
• UdpSocket::take_error
• UdpSocket::connect
• UdpSocket::send
• UdpSocket::recv
• UdpSocket::set_nonblocking

Libraries

• std::sync::Once is poisoned if its initialization function fails.
• cell::Ref and cell::RefMut can contain unsized types.
• Most types implement fmt::Debug.
• The default buffer size used by BufReader and BufWriter was reduced to 8K, from 64K. This is in line with the buffer size used by other languages.
• Instant, SystemTime and Duration implement += and -=. Duration additionally implements *= and /=.
• Skip is a DoubleEndedIterator.
• From<[u8; 4]> is implemented for Ipv4Addr.
• Chain implements BufRead.
• HashMap, HashSet and iterators are covariant.

Cargo

• Cargo can now run concurrently.
• Top-level overrides allow specific revisions of crates to be overridden through the entire crate graph. This is intended to make upgrades easier for large projects, by allowing crates to be forked temporarily until they've been upgraded and republished.
• Cargo exports a CARGO_PKG_AUTHORS environment variable.
• Cargo will pass the contents of the RUSTFLAGS variable to rustc on the commandline. rustc arguments can also be specified in the build.rustflags configuration key.

Performance

• The time complexity of comparing variables for equivalence during type unification is reduced from O(n!) to O(n). This leads to major compilation time improvement in some scenarios.
• ToString is specialized for str, giving it the same performance as to_owned.
• Spawning processes with Command::output no longer creates extra threads.
• #[derive(PartialEq)] and #[derive(PartialOrd)] emit less code for C-like enums.

Misc

• Passing the --quiet flag to a test runner will produce much-abbreviated output.
• The Rust Project now publishes std binaries for the mips-unknown-linux-musl, mipsel-unknown-linux-musl, and i586-pc-windows-msvc targets.

Compatibility Notes

• std::sync::Once is poisoned if its initialization function fails.
• It is illegal to define methods with the same name in overlapping inherent impl blocks.
• fn item types are zero sized, and each fn names a unique type. This will break code that transmutes fns, so calling transmute on a fn type will generate a warning for a few cycles, then will be converted to an error.
• Improvements to const evaluation may trigger new errors when integer literals are out of range.

Version 1.8.0 (2016-04-14)

Language

• Rust supports overloading of compound assignment statements like += by implementing the AddAssign, SubAssign, MulAssign, DivAssign, RemAssign, BitAndAssign, BitOrAssign, BitXorAssign, ShlAssign, or ShrAssign traits. RFC 953.
• Empty structs can be defined with braces, as in struct Foo { }, in addition to the non-braced form, struct Foo;. RFC 218.

Libraries

• Stabilized APIs:
  • str::encode_utf16 (renamed from utf16_units)
  • str::EncodeUtf16 (renamed from Utf16Units)
  • Ref::map
  • RefMut::map
  • ptr::drop_in_place
  • time::Instant
  • time::SystemTime
  • Instant::now
  • Instant::duration_since (renamed from duration_from_earlier)
  • Instant::elapsed
  • SystemTime::now
  • SystemTime::duration_since (renamed from duration_from_earlier)
  • SystemTime::elapsed
  • Various Add/Sub impls for Time and SystemTime
  • SystemTimeError
  • SystemTimeError::duration
  • Various impls for SystemTimeError
  • UNIX_EPOCH
  • AddAssign, SubAssign, MulAssign, DivAssign, RemAssign, BitAndAssign, BitOrAssign, BitXorAssign, ShlAssign, ShrAssign.
• The write! and writeln! macros correctly emit errors if any of their arguments can't be formatted.
• Various I/O functions support large files on 32-bit Linux.
• The Unix-specific raw modules, which contain a number of redefined C types are deprecated, including os::raw::unix, os::raw::macos, and os::raw::linux. These modules defined types such as ino_t and dev_t. The inconsistency of these definitions across platforms was making it difficult to implement std correctly. Those that need these definitions should use the libc crate. RFC 1415.
• The Unix-specific MetadataExt traits, including os::unix::fs::MetadataExt, which expose values such as inode numbers no longer return platform-specific types, but instead return widened integers. RFC 1415.
• btree_set::{IntoIter, Iter, Range} are covariant.
• Atomic loads and stores are not volatile.
• All types in sync::mpsc implement fmt::Debug.

Performance

• Inlining hash functions lead to a 3% compile-time improvement in some workloads.
• When using jemalloc, its symbols are unprefixed so that it overrides the libc malloc implementation. This means that for rustc, LLVM is now using jemalloc, which results in a 6% compile-time improvement on a specific workload.
• Avoid quadratic growth in function size due to cleanups.

Misc

• 32-bit MSVC builds finally implement unwinding. i686-pc-windows-msvc is now considered a tier-1 platform.
• The --print targets flag prints a list of supported targets.
• The --print cfg flag prints the cfgs defined for the current target.
• rustc can be built with an new Cargo-based build system, written in Rust. It will eventually replace Rust's Makefile-based build system. To enable it configure with configure --rustbuild.
• Errors for non-exhaustive match patterns now list up to 3 missing variants while also indicating the total number of missing variants if more than 3.
• Executable stacks are disabled on Linux and BSD.
• The Rust Project now publishes binary releases of the standard library for a number of tier-2 targets: armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf, powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu, powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu, powerpc64le-unknown-linux-gnu x86_64-rumprun-netbsd. These can be installed with tools such as multirust.

Cargo

• cargo init creates a new Cargo project in the current directory. It is otherwise like cargo new.
• Cargo has configuration keys for -v and --color. verbose and color, respectively, go in the [term] section of .cargo/config.
• Configuration keys that evaluate to strings or integers can be set via environment variables. For example the build.jobs key can be set via CARGO_BUILD_JOBS. Environment variables take precedence over config files.
• Target-specific dependencies support Rust cfg syntax for describing targets so that dependencies for multiple targets can be specified together. RFC 1361.
• The environment variables CARGO_TARGET_ROOT, RUSTC, and RUSTDOC take precedence over the build.target-dir, build.rustc, and build.rustdoc configuration values.
• The child process tree is killed on Windows when Cargo is killed.
• The build.target configuration value sets the target platform, like --target.

Compatibility Notes

• Unstable compiler flags have been further restricted. Since 1.0 -Z flags have been considered unstable, and other flags that were considered unstable additionally required passing -Z unstable-options to access. Unlike unstable language and library features though, these options have been accessible on the stable release channel. Going forward, new unstable flags will not be available on the stable release channel, and old unstable flags will warn about their usage. In the future, all unstable flags will be unavailable on the stable release channel.
• It is no longer possible to match on empty enum variants using the Variant(..) syntax. This has been a warning since 1.6.
• The Unix-specific MetadataExt traits, including os::unix::fs::MetadataExt, which expose values such as inode numbers no longer return platform-specific types, but instead return widened integers. RFC 1415.
• Modules sourced from the filesystem cannot appear within arbitrary blocks, but only within other modules.
• --cfg compiler flags are parsed strictly as identifiers.
• On Unix, stack overflow triggers a runtime abort instead of a SIGSEGV.
• Command::spawn and its equivalents return an error if any of its command-line arguments contain interior NULs.
• Tuple and unit enum variants from other crates are in the type namespace.
• On Windows rustc emits .lib files for the staticlib library type instead of .a files. Additionally, for the MSVC toolchain, rustc emits import libraries named foo.dll.lib instead of foo.lib.

Version 1.7.0 (2016-03-03)

Libraries

• Stabilized APIs
  • Path
    • Path::strip_prefix (renamed from relative_from)
    • path::StripPrefixError (new error type returned from strip_prefix)
  • Ipv4Addr
    • Ipv4Addr::is_loopback
    • Ipv4Addr::is_private
    • Ipv4Addr::is_link_local
    • Ipv4Addr::is_multicast
    • Ipv4Addr::is_broadcast
    • Ipv4Addr::is_documentation
  • Ipv6Addr
    • Ipv6Addr::is_unspecified
    • Ipv6Addr::is_loopback
    • Ipv6Addr::is_multicast
  • Vec
    • Vec::as_slice
    • Vec::as_mut_slice
  • String
    • String::as_str
    • String::as_mut_str
  • Slices
    • <[T]>::clone_from_slice, which now requires the two slices to be the same length
    • <[T]>::sort_by_key
  • checked, saturated, and overflowing operations
    • i32::checked_rem, i32::checked_neg, i32::checked_shl, i32::checked_shr
    • i32::saturating_mul
    • i32::overflowing_add, i32::overflowing_sub, i32::overflowing_mul, i32::overflowing_div
    • i32::overflowing_rem, i32::overflowing_neg, i32::overflowing_shl, i32::overflowing_shr
    • u32::checked_rem, u32::checked_neg, u32::checked_shl, u32::checked_shl
    • u32::saturating_mul
    • u32::overflowing_add, u32::overflowing_sub, u32::overflowing_mul, u32::overflowing_div
    • u32::overflowing_rem, u32::overflowing_neg, u32::overflowing_shl, u32::overflowing_shr
    • and checked, saturated, and overflowing operations for other primitive types
  • FFI
    • ffi::IntoStringError
    • CString::into_string
    • CString::into_bytes
    • CString::into_bytes_with_nul
    • From<CString> for Vec<u8>
  • IntoStringError
    • IntoStringError::into_cstring
    • IntoStringError::utf8_error
    • Error for IntoStringError
  • Hashing
    • std::hash::BuildHasher
    • BuildHasher::Hasher
    • BuildHasher::build_hasher
    • std::hash::BuildHasherDefault
    • HashMap::with_hasher
    • HashMap::with_capacity_and_hasher
    • HashSet::with_hasher
    • HashSet::with_capacity_and_hasher
    • std::collections::hash_map::RandomState
    • RandomState::new
• Validating UTF-8 is faster by a factor of between 7 and 14x for ASCII input. This means that creating Strings and strs from bytes is faster.
• The performance of LineWriter (and thus io::stdout) was improved by using memchr to search for newlines.
• f32::to_degrees and f32::to_radians are stable. The f64 variants were stabilized previously.
• BTreeMap was rewritten to use less memory and improve the performance of insertion and iteration, the latter by as much as 5x.
• BTreeSet and its iterators, Iter, IntoIter, and Range are covariant over their contained type.
• LinkedList and its iterators, Iter and IntoIter are covariant over their contained type.
• str::replace now accepts a Pattern, like other string searching methods.
• Any is implemented for unsized types.
• Hash is implemented for Duration.

Misc

• When running tests with --test, rustdoc will pass --cfg arguments to the compiler.
• The compiler is built with RPATH information by default. This means that it will be possible to run rustc when installed in unusual configurations without configuring the dynamic linker search path explicitly.
• rustc passes --enable-new-dtags to GNU ld. This makes any RPATH entries (emitted with -C rpath) not take precedence over LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Cargo

• cargo rustc accepts a --profile flag that runs rustc under any of the compilation profiles, 'dev', 'bench', or 'test'.
• The rerun-if-changed build script directive no longer causes the build script to incorrectly run twice in certain scenarios.

Compatibility Notes

• Soundness fixes to the interactions between associated types and lifetimes, specified in RFC 1214, now generate errors for code that violates the new rules. This is a significant change that is known to break existing code, so it has emitted warnings for the new error cases since 1.4 to give crate authors time to adapt. The details of what is changing are subtle; read the RFC for more.
• Several bugs in the compiler's visibility calculations were fixed. Since this was found to break significant amounts of code, the new errors will be emitted as warnings for several release cycles, under the private_in_public lint.
• Defaulted type parameters were accidentally accepted in positions that were not intended. In this release, defaulted type parameters appearing outside of type definitions will generate a warning, which will become an error in future releases.
• Parsing "." as a float results in an error instead of 0. That is, ".".parse::<f32>() returns Err, not Ok(0.0).
• Borrows of closure parameters may not outlive the closure.

Version 1.6.0 (2016-01-21)

Language

• The #![no_std] attribute causes a crate to not be linked to the standard library, but only the core library, as described in RFC 1184. The core library defines common types and traits but has no platform dependencies whatsoever, and is the basis for Rust software in environments that cannot support a full port of the standard library, such as operating systems. Most of the core library is now stable.

Libraries

• Stabilized APIs: Read::read_exact, ErrorKind::UnexpectedEof (renamed from UnexpectedEOF), fs::DirBuilder, fs::DirBuilder::new, fs::DirBuilder::recursive, fs::DirBuilder::create, os::unix::fs::DirBuilderExt, os::unix::fs::DirBuilderExt::mode, vec::Drain, vec::Vec::drain, string::Drain, string::String::drain, vec_deque::Drain, vec_deque::VecDeque::drain, collections::hash_map::Drain, collections::hash_map::HashMap::drain, collections::hash_set::Drain, collections::hash_set::HashSet::drain, collections::binary_heap::Drain, collections::binary_heap::BinaryHeap::drain, Vec::extend_from_slice (renamed from push_all), Mutex::get_mut, Mutex::into_inner, RwLock::get_mut, RwLock::into_inner, Iterator::min_by_key (renamed from min_by), Iterator::max_by_key (renamed from max_by).
• The core library is stable, as are most of its APIs.
• The assert_eq! macro supports arguments that don't implement Sized, such as arrays. In this way it behaves more like assert!.
• Several timer functions that take duration in milliseconds are deprecated in favor of those that take Duration. These include Condvar::wait_timeout_ms, thread::sleep_ms, and thread::park_timeout_ms.
• The algorithm by which Vec reserves additional elements was tweaked to not allocate excessive space while still growing exponentially.
• From conversions are implemented from integers to floats in cases where the conversion is lossless. Thus they are not implemented for 32-bit ints to f32, nor for 64-bit ints to f32 or f64. They are also not implemented for isize and usize because the implementations would be platform-specific. From is also implemented from f32 to f64.
• From<&Path> and From<PathBuf> are implemented for Cow<Path>.
• From<T> is implemented for Box<T>, Rc<T> and Arc<T>.
• IntoIterator is implemented for &PathBuf and &Path.
• BinaryHeap was refactored for modest performance improvements.
• Sorting slices that are already sorted is 50% faster in some cases.

Cargo

• Cargo will look in $CARGO_HOME/bin for subcommands by default.
• Cargo build scripts can specify their dependencies by emitting the rerun-if-changed key.
• crates.io will reject publication of crates with dependencies that have a wildcard version constraint. Crates with wildcard dependencies were seen to cause a variety of problems, as described in RFC 1241. Since 1.5 publication of such crates has emitted a warning.
• cargo clean accepts a --release flag to clean the release folder. A variety of artifacts that Cargo failed to clean are now correctly deleted.

Misc

• The unreachable_code lint warns when a function call's argument diverges.
• The parser indicates failures that may be caused by confusingly-similar Unicode characters
• Certain macro errors are reported at definition time, not expansion.

Compatibility Notes

• The compiler no longer makes use of the RUST_PATH environment variable when locating crates. This was a pre-cargo feature for integrating with the package manager that was accidentally never removed.
• A number of bugs were fixed in the privacy checker that could cause previously-accepted code to break.
• Modules and unit/tuple structs may not share the same name.
• Bugs in pattern matching unit structs were fixed. The tuple struct pattern syntax (Foo(..)) can no longer be used to match unit structs. This is a warning now, but will become an error in future releases. Patterns that share the same name as a const are now an error.
• A bug was fixed that causes rustc not to apply default type parameters when resolving certain method implementations of traits defined in other crates.

Version 1.5.0 (2015-12-10)

• ~700 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• Stabilized APIs: BinaryHeap::from, BinaryHeap::into_sorted_vec, BinaryHeap::into_vec, Condvar::wait_timeout, FileTypeExt::is_block_device, FileTypeExt::is_char_device, FileTypeExt::is_fifo, FileTypeExt::is_socket, FileTypeExt, Formatter::alternate, Formatter::fill, Formatter::precision, Formatter::sign_aware_zero_pad, Formatter::sign_minus, Formatter::sign_plus, Formatter::width, Iterator::cmp, Iterator::eq, Iterator::ge, Iterator::gt, Iterator::le, Iterator::lt, Iterator::ne, Iterator::partial_cmp, Path::canonicalize, Path::exists, Path::is_dir, Path::is_file, Path::metadata, Path::read_dir, Path::read_link, Path::symlink_metadata, Utf8Error::valid_up_to, Vec::resize, VecDeque::as_mut_slices, VecDeque::as_slices, VecDeque::insert, VecDeque::shrink_to_fit, VecDeque::swap_remove_back, VecDeque::swap_remove_front, slice::split_first_mut, slice::split_first, slice::split_last_mut, slice::split_last, char::from_u32_unchecked, fs::canonicalize, str::MatchIndices, str::RMatchIndices, str::match_indices, str::rmatch_indices, str::slice_mut_unchecked, string::ParseError.
• Rust applications hosted on crates.io can be installed locally to ~/.cargo/bin with the cargo install command. Among other things this makes it easier to augment Cargo with new subcommands: when a binary named e.g. cargo-foo is found in $PATH it can be invoked as cargo foo.
• Crates with wildcard (*) dependencies will emit warnings when published. In 1.6 it will no longer be possible to publish crates with wildcard dependencies.

Breaking Changes

• The rules determining when a particular lifetime must outlive a particular value (known as 'dropck') have been modified to not rely on parametricity.
• Implementations of AsRef and AsMut were added to Box, Rc, and Arc. Because these smart pointer types implement Deref, this causes breakage in cases where the interior type contains methods of the same name.
• Correct a bug in Rc/Arc that caused dropck to be unaware that they could drop their content. Soundness fix.
• All method invocations are properly checked for well-formedness. Soundness fix.
• Traits whose supertraits contain Self are not object safe. Soundness fix.
• Target specifications support a no_default_libraries setting that controls whether -nodefaultlibs is passed to the linker, and in turn the is_like_windows setting no longer affects the -nodefaultlibs flag.
• #[derive(Show)], long-deprecated, has been removed.
• The #[inline] and #[repr] attributes can only appear in valid locations.
• Native libraries linked from the local crate are passed to the linker before native libraries from upstream crates.
• Two rarely-used attributes, #[no_debug] and #[omit_gdb_pretty_printer_section] are feature gated.
• Negation of unsigned integers, which has been a warning for several releases, is now behind a feature gate and will generate errors.
• The parser accidentally accepted visibility modifiers on enum variants, a bug which has been fixed.
• A bug was fixed that allowed use statements to import unstable features.

Language

• When evaluating expressions at compile-time that are not compile-time constants (const-evaluating expressions in non-const contexts), incorrect code such as overlong bitshifts and arithmetic overflow will generate a warning instead of an error, delaying the error until runtime. This will allow the const-evaluator to be expanded in the future backwards-compatibly.
• The improper_ctypes lint no longer warns about using isize and usize in FFI.

Libraries

• Arc<T> and Rc<T> are covariant with respect to T instead of invariant.
• Default is implemented for mutable slices.
• FromStr is implemented for SockAddrV4 and SockAddrV6.
• There are now From conversions between floating point types where the conversions are lossless.
• There are now From conversions between integer types where the conversions are lossless.
• fs::Metadata implements Clone.
• The parse method accepts a leading "+" when parsing integers.
• AsMut is implemented for Vec.
• The clone_from implementations for String and BinaryHeap have been optimized and no longer rely on the default impl.
• The extern "Rust", extern "C", unsafe extern "Rust" and unsafe extern "C" function types now implement Clone, PartialEq, Eq, PartialOrd, Ord, Hash, fmt::Pointer, and fmt::Debug for up to 12 arguments.
• Dropping Vecs is much faster in unoptimized builds when the element types don't implement Drop.
• A bug that caused in incorrect behavior when combining VecDeque with zero-sized types was resolved.
• PartialOrd for slices is faster.

Miscellaneous

• Crate metadata size was reduced by 20%.
• Improvements to code generation reduced the size of libcore by 3.3 MB and rustc's memory usage by 18MB.
• Improvements to deref translation increased performance in unoptimized builds.
• Various errors in trait resolution are deduplicated to only be reported once.
• Rust has preliminary support for rumprun kernels.
• Rust has preliminary support for NetBSD on amd64.

Version 1.4.0 (2015-10-29)

• ~1200 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• Windows builds targeting the 64-bit MSVC ABI and linker (instead of GNU) are now supported and recommended for use.

Breaking Changes

• Several changes have been made to fix type soundness and improve the behavior of associated types. See RFC 1214. Although we have mostly introduced these changes as warnings this release, to become errors next release, there are still some scenarios that will see immediate breakage.
• The str::lines and BufRead::lines iterators treat \r\n as line breaks in addition to \n.
• Loans of 'static lifetime extend to the end of a function.
• str::parse no longer introduces avoidable rounding error when parsing floating point numbers. Together with earlier changes to float formatting/output, "round trips" like f.to_string().parse() now preserve the value of f exactly. Additionally, leading plus signs are now accepted.

Language

• use statements that import multiple items can now rename them, as in use foo::{bar as kitten, baz as puppy}.
• Binops work correctly on fat pointers.
• pub extern crate, which does not behave as expected, issues a warning until a better solution is found.

Libraries

• Many APIs were stabilized: <Box<str>>::into_string, Arc::downgrade, Arc::get_mut, Arc::make_mut, Arc::try_unwrap, Box::from_raw, Box::into_raw, CStr::to_str, CStr::to_string_lossy, CString::from_raw, CString::into_raw, IntoRawFd::into_raw_fd, IntoRawFd, IntoRawHandle::into_raw_handle, IntoRawHandle, IntoRawSocket::into_raw_socket, IntoRawSocket, Rc::downgrade, Rc::get_mut, Rc::make_mut, Rc::try_unwrap, Result::expect, String::into_boxed_str, TcpStream::read_timeout, TcpStream::set_read_timeout, TcpStream::set_write_timeout, TcpStream::write_timeout, UdpSocket::read_timeout, UdpSocket::set_read_timeout, UdpSocket::set_write_timeout, UdpSocket::write_timeout, Vec::append, Vec::split_off, VecDeque::append, VecDeque::retain, VecDeque::split_off, rc::Weak::upgrade, rc::Weak, slice::Iter::as_slice, slice::IterMut::into_slice, str::CharIndices::as_str, str::Chars::as_str, str::split_at_mut, str::split_at, sync::Weak::upgrade, sync::Weak, thread::park_timeout, thread::sleep.
• Some APIs were deprecated: BTreeMap::with_b, BTreeSet::with_b, Option::as_mut_slice, Option::as_slice, Result::as_mut_slice, Result::as_slice, f32::from_str_radix, f64::from_str_radix.
• Reverse-searching strings is faster with the 'two-way' algorithm.
• std::io::copy allows ?Sized arguments.
• The Windows, Chunks, and ChunksMut iterators over slices all override count, nth and last with an O(1) implementation.
• Default is implemented for arrays up to [T; 32].
• IntoRawFd has been added to the Unix-specific prelude, IntoRawSocket and IntoRawHandle to the Windows-specific prelude.
• Extend<String> and FromIterator<String are both implemented for String.
• IntoIterator is implemented for references to Option and Result.
• HashMap and HashSet implement Extend<&T> where T: Copy as part of RFC 839. This will cause type inference breakage in rare situations.
• BinaryHeap implements Debug.
• Borrow and BorrowMut are implemented for fixed-size arrays.
• extern fns with the "Rust" and "C" ABIs implement common traits including Eq, Ord, Debug, Hash.
• String comparison is faster.
• &mut T where T: std::fmt::Write also implements std::fmt::Write.
• A stable regression in VecDeque::push_back and other capacity-altering methods that caused panics for zero-sized types was fixed.
• Function pointers implement traits for up to 12 parameters.

Miscellaneous

• The compiler no longer uses the 'morestack' feature to prevent stack overflow. Instead it uses guard pages and stack probes (though stack probes are not yet implemented on any platform but Windows).
• The compiler matches traits faster when projections are involved.
• The 'improper_ctypes' lint no longer warns about use of isize and usize.
• Cargo now displays useful information about what its doing during cargo update.

Version 1.3.0 (2015-09-17)

• ~900 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• The new object lifetime defaults have been turned on after a cycle of warnings about the change. Now types like &'a Box<Trait> (or &'a Rc<Trait>, etc) will change from being interpreted as &'a Box<Trait+'a> to &'a Box<Trait+'static>.
• The Rustonomicon is a new book in the official documentation that dives into writing unsafe Rust.
• The Duration API, has been stabilized. This basic unit of timekeeping is employed by other std APIs, as well as out-of-tree time crates.

Breaking Changes

• The new object lifetime defaults have been turned on after a cycle of warnings about the change.
• There is a known regression in how object lifetime elision is interpreted, the proper solution for which is undetermined.
• The #[prelude_import] attribute, an internal implementation detail, was accidentally stabilized previously. It has been put behind the prelude_import feature gate. This change is believed to break no existing code.
• The behavior of size_of_val and align_of_val is more sane for dynamically sized types. Code that relied on the previous behavior is thought to be broken.
• The dropck rules, which checks that destructors can't access destroyed values, have been updated to match the RFC. This fixes some soundness holes, and as such will cause some previously-compiling code to no longer build.

Language

• The new object lifetime defaults have been turned on after a cycle of warnings about the change.
• Semicolons may now follow types and paths in macros.
• The behavior of size_of_val and align_of_val is more sane for dynamically sized types. Code that relied on the previous behavior is not known to exist, and suspected to be broken.
• 'static variables may now be recursive.
• ref bindings choose between Deref and DerefMut implementations correctly.
• The dropck rules, which checks that destructors can't access destroyed values, have been updated to match the RFC.

Libraries

• The Duration API, has been stabilized, as well as the std::time module, which presently contains only Duration.
• Box<str> and Box<[T]> both implement Clone.
• The owned C string, CString, implements Borrow and the borrowed C string, CStr, implements ToOwned. The two of these allow C strings to be borrowed and cloned in generic code.
• CStr implements Debug.
• AtomicPtr implements Debug.
• Error trait objects can be downcast to their concrete types in many common configurations, using the is, downcast, downcast_ref and downcast_mut methods, similarly to the Any trait.
• Searching for substrings now employs the two-way algorithm instead of doing a naive search. This gives major speedups to a number of methods, including contains, find, rfind, split. starts_with and ends_with are also faster.
• The performance of PartialEq for slices is much faster.
• The Hash trait offers the default method, hash_slice, which is overridden and optimized by the implementations for scalars.
• The Hasher trait now has a number of specialized write_* methods for primitive types, for efficiency.
• The I/O-specific error type, std::io::Error, gained a set of methods for accessing the 'inner error', if any: get_ref, get_mut, into_inner. As well, the implementation of std::error::Error::cause also delegates to the inner error.
• process::Child gained the id method, which returns a u32 representing the platform-specific process identifier.
• The connect method on slices is deprecated, replaced by the new join method (note that both of these are on the unstable SliceConcatExt trait, but through the magic of the prelude are available to stable code anyway).
• The Div operator is implemented for Wrapping types.
• DerefMut is implemented for String.
• Performance of SipHash (the default hasher for HashMap) is better for long data.
• AtomicPtr implements Send.
• The read_to_end implementations for Stdin and File are now specialized to use uninitialized buffers for increased performance.
• Lifetime parameters of foreign functions are now resolved properly.

Misc

• Rust can now, with some coercion, produce programs that run on Windows XP, though XP is not considered a supported platform.
• Porting Rust on Windows from the GNU toolchain to MSVC continues (1, 2, 3, 4). It is still not recommended for use in 1.3, though should be fully-functional in the 64-bit 1.4 beta.
• On Fedora-based systems installation will properly configure the dynamic linker.
• The compiler gained many new extended error descriptions, which can be accessed with the --explain flag.
• The dropck pass, which checks that destructors can't access destroyed values, has been rewritten. This fixes some soundness holes, and as such will cause some previously-compiling code to no longer build.
• rustc now uses LLVM to write archive files where possible. Eventually this will eliminate the compiler's dependency on the ar utility.
• Rust has preliminary support for i686 FreeBSD (it has long supported FreeBSD on x86_64).
• The unused_mut, unconditional_recursion, improper_ctypes, and negate_unsigned lints are more strict.
• If landing pads are disabled (with -Z no-landing-pads), panic! will kill the process instead of leaking.

Version 1.2.0 (2015-08-07)

• ~1200 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• Dynamically-sized-type coercions allow smart pointer types like Rc to contain types without a fixed size, arrays and trait objects, finally enabling use of Rc<[T]> and completing the implementation of DST.
• Parallel codegen is now working again, which can substantially speed up large builds in debug mode; It also gets another ~33% speedup when bootstrapping on a 4 core machine (using 8 jobs). It's not enabled by default, but will be "in the near future". It can be activated with the -C codegen-units=N flag to rustc.
• This is the first release with experimental support for linking with the MSVC linker and lib C on Windows (instead of using the GNU variants via MinGW). It is yet recommended only for the most intrepid Rustaceans.
• Benchmark compilations are showing a 30% improvement in bootstrapping over 1.1.

Breaking Changes

• The to_uppercase and to_lowercase methods on char now do unicode case mapping, which is a previously-planned change in behavior and considered a bugfix.
• mem::align_of now specifies the minimum alignment for T, which is usually the alignment programs are interested in, and the same value reported by clang's alignof. mem::min_align_of is deprecated. This is not known to break real code.
• The #[packed] attribute is no longer silently accepted by the compiler. This attribute did nothing and code that mentioned it likely did not work as intended.
• Associated type defaults are now behind the associated_type_defaults feature gate. In 1.1 associated type defaults did not work, but could be mentioned syntactically. As such this breakage has minimal impact.

Language

• Patterns with ref mut now correctly invoke DerefMut when matching against dereferencable values.

Libraries

• The Extend trait, which grows a collection from an iterator, is implemented over iterators of references, for String, Vec, LinkedList, VecDeque, EnumSet, BinaryHeap, VecMap, BTreeSet and BTreeMap. RFC.
• The iter::once function returns an iterator that yields a single element, and iter::empty returns an iterator that yields no elements.
• The matches and rmatches methods on str return iterators over substring matches.
• Cell and RefCell both implement Eq.
• A number of methods for wrapping arithmetic are added to the integral types, wrapping_div, wrapping_rem, wrapping_neg, wrapping_shl, wrapping_shr. These are in addition to the existing wrapping_add, wrapping_sub, and wrapping_mul methods, and alternatives to the Wrapping type.. It is illegal for the default arithmetic operations in Rust to overflow; the desire to wrap must be explicit.
• The {:#?} formatting specifier displays the alternate, pretty-printed form of the Debug formatter. This feature was actually introduced prior to 1.0 with little fanfare.
• fmt::Formatter implements fmt::Write, a fmt-specific trait for writing data to formatted strings, similar to io::Write.
• fmt::Formatter adds 'debug builder' methods, debug_struct, debug_tuple, debug_list, debug_set, debug_map. These are used by code generators to emit implementations of Debug.
• str has new to_uppercase and to_lowercase methods that convert case, following Unicode case mapping.
• It is now easier to handle poisoned locks. The PoisonError type, returned by failing lock operations, exposes into_inner, get_ref, and get_mut, which all give access to the inner lock guard, and allow the poisoned lock to continue to operate. The is_poisoned method of RwLock and Mutex can poll for a poisoned lock without attempting to take the lock.
• On Unix the FromRawFd trait is implemented for Stdio, and AsRawFd for ChildStdin, ChildStdout, ChildStderr. On Windows the FromRawHandle trait is implemented for Stdio, and AsRawHandle for ChildStdin, ChildStdout, ChildStderr.
• io::ErrorKind has a new variant, InvalidData, which indicates malformed input.

Misc

• rustc employs smarter heuristics for guessing at typos.
• rustc emits more efficient code for no-op conversions between unsafe pointers.
• Fat pointers are now passed in pairs of immediate arguments, resulting in faster compile times and smaller code.

Version 1.1.0 (2015-06-25)

• ~850 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• The std::fs module has been expanded to expand the set of functionality exposed:
  • DirEntry now supports optimizations like file_type and metadata which don't incur a syscall on some platforms.
  • A symlink_metadata function has been added.
  • The fs::Metadata structure now lowers to its OS counterpart, providing access to all underlying information.
• The compiler now contains extended explanations of many errors. When an error with an explanation occurs the compiler suggests using the --explain flag to read the explanation. Error explanations are also available online.
• Thanks to multiple improvements to type checking, as well as other work, the time to bootstrap the compiler decreased by 32%.

Libraries

• The str::split_whitespace method splits a string on unicode whitespace boundaries.
• On both Windows and Unix, new extension traits provide conversion of I/O types to and from the underlying system handles. On Unix, these traits are FromRawFd and AsRawFd, on Windows FromRawHandle and AsRawHandle. These are implemented for File, TcpStream, TcpListener, and UpdSocket. Further implementations for std::process will be stabilized later.
• On Unix, std::os::unix::symlink creates symlinks. On Windows, symlinks can be created with std::os::windows::symlink_dir and std::os::windows::symlink_file.
• The mpsc::Receiver type can now be converted into an iterator with into_iter on the IntoIterator trait.
• Ipv4Addr can be created from u32 with the From<u32> implementation of the From trait.
• The Debug implementation for RangeFull creates output that is more consistent with other implementations.
• Debug is implemented for File.
• The Default implementation for Arc no longer requires Sync + Send.
• The Iterator methods count, nth, and last have been overridden for slices to have O(1) performance instead of O(n).
• Incorrect handling of paths on Windows has been improved in both the compiler and the standard library.
• AtomicPtr gained a Default implementation.
• In accordance with Rust's policy on arithmetic overflow abs now panics on overflow when debug assertions are enabled.
• The Cloned iterator, which was accidentally left unstable for 1.0 has been stabilized.
• The Incoming iterator, which iterates over incoming TCP connections, and which was accidentally unnamable in 1.0, is now properly exported.
• BinaryHeap no longer corrupts itself when functions called by sift_up or sift_down panic.
• The split_off method of LinkedList no longer corrupts the list in certain scenarios.

Misc

• Type checking performance has improved notably with multiple improvements.
• The compiler suggests code changes for more errors.
• rustc and it's build system have experimental support for building toolchains against MUSL instead of glibc on Linux.
• The compiler defines the target_env cfg value, which is used for distinguishing toolchains that are otherwise for the same platform. Presently this is set to gnu for common GNU Linux targets and for MinGW targets, and musl for MUSL Linux targets.
• The cargo rustc command invokes a build with custom flags to rustc.
• Android executables are always position independent.
• The drop_with_repr_extern lint warns about mixing repr(C) with Drop.

Version 1.0.0 (2015-05-15)

• ~1500 changes, numerous bugfixes

Highlights

• The vast majority of the standard library is now #[stable]. It is no longer possible to use unstable features with a stable build of the compiler.
• Many popular crates on crates.io now work on the stable release channel.
• Arithmetic on basic integer types now checks for overflow in debug builds.

Language

• Several restrictions have been added to trait coherence in order to make it easier for upstream authors to change traits without breaking downstream code.
• Digits of binary and octal literals are lexed more eagerly to improve error messages and macro behavior. For example, 0b1234 is now lexed as 0b1234 instead of two tokens, 0b1 and 234.
• Trait bounds are always invariant, eliminating the need for the PhantomFn and MarkerTrait lang items, which have been removed.
• "-" is no longer a valid character in crate names, the extern crate "foo" as bar syntax has been replaced with extern crate foo as bar, and Cargo now automatically translates "-" in package names to underscore for the crate name.
• Lifetime shadowing is an error.
• Send no longer implies 'static.
• UFCS now supports trait-less associated paths like MyType::default().
• Primitive types now have inherent methods, obviating the need for extension traits like SliceExt.
• Methods with Self: Sized in their where clause are considered object-safe, allowing many extension traits like IteratorExt to be merged into the traits they extended.
• You can now refer to associated types whose corresponding trait bounds appear only in a where clause.
• The final bits of OIBIT landed, meaning that traits like Send and Sync are now library-defined.
• A Reflect trait was introduced, which means that downcasting via the Any trait is effectively limited to concrete types. This helps retain the potentially-important "parametricity" property: generic code cannot behave differently for different type arguments except in minor ways.
• The unsafe_destructor feature is now deprecated in favor of the new dropck. This change is a major reduction in unsafe code.

Libraries

• The thread_local module has been renamed to std::thread.
• The methods of IteratorExt have been moved to the Iterator trait itself.
• Several traits that implement Rust's conventions for type conversions, AsMut, AsRef, From, and Into have been centralized in the std::convert module.
• The FromError trait was removed in favor of From.
• The basic sleep function has moved to std::thread::sleep_ms.
• The splitn function now takes an n parameter that represents the number of items yielded by the returned iterator instead of the number of 'splits'.
• On Unix, all file descriptors are CLOEXEC by default.
• Derived implementations of PartialOrd now order enums according to their explicitly-assigned discriminants.
• Methods for searching strings are generic over Patterns, implemented presently by &char, &str, FnMut(char) -> bool and some others.
• In method resolution, object methods are resolved before inherent methods.
• String::from_str has been deprecated in favor of the From impl, String::from.
• io::Error implements Sync.
• The words method on &str has been replaced with split_whitespace, to avoid answering the tricky question, 'what is a word?'
• The new path and IO modules are complete and #[stable]. This was the major library focus for this cycle.
• The path API was revised to normalize ., adjusting the tradeoffs in favor of the most common usage.
• A large number of remaining APIs in std were also stabilized during this cycle; about 75% of the non-deprecated API surface is now stable.
• The new string pattern API landed, which makes the string slice API much more internally consistent and flexible.
• A new set of generic conversion traits replaced many existing ad hoc traits.
• Generic numeric traits were completely removed. This was made possible thanks to inherent methods for primitive types, and the removal gives maximal flexibility for designing a numeric hierarchy in the future.
• The Fn traits are now related via inheritance and provide ergonomic blanket implementations.
• The Index and IndexMut traits were changed to take the index by value, enabling code like hash_map["string"] to work.
• Copy now inherits from Clone, meaning that all Copy data is known to be Clone as well.

Misc

• Many errors now have extended explanations that can be accessed with the --explain flag to rustc.
• Many new examples have been added to the standard library documentation.
• rustdoc has received a number of improvements focused on completion and polish.
• Metadata was tuned, shrinking binaries by 27%.
• Much headway was made on ecosystem-wide CI, making it possible to compare builds for breakage.

Version 1.0.0-alpha.2 (2015-02-20)

• ~1300 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Highlights

  • The various I/O modules were overhauled to reduce unnecessary abstractions and provide better interoperation with the underlying platform. The old io module remains temporarily at std::old_io.
  • The standard library now participates in feature gating, so use of unstable libraries now requires a #![feature(...)] attribute. The impact of this change is described on the forum. RFC.

• Language

  • for loops now operate on the IntoIterator trait, which eliminates the need to call .iter(), etc. to iterate over collections. There are some new subtleties to remember though regarding what sort of iterators various types yield, in particular that for foo in bar { } yields values from a move iterator, destroying the original collection. RFC.
  • Objects now have default lifetime bounds, so you don't have to write Box<Trait+'static> when you don't care about storing references. RFC.
  • In types that implement Drop, lifetimes must outlive the value. This will soon make it possible to safely implement Drop for types where #[unsafe_destructor] is now required. Read the gorgeous RFC for details.
  • The fully qualified ::X syntax lets you set the Self type for a trait method or associated type. RFC.
  • References to types that implement Deref<U> now automatically coerce to references to the dereferenced type U, e.g. &T where T: Deref<U> automatically coerces to &U. This should eliminate many unsightly uses of &*, as when converting from references to vectors into references to slices. RFC.
  • The explicit closure kind syntax (|&:|, |&mut:|, |:|) is obsolete and closure kind is inferred from context.
  • Self is a keyword.

• Libraries

  • The Show and String formatting traits have been renamed to Debug and Display to more clearly reflect their related purposes. Automatically getting a string conversion to use with format!("{:?}", something_to_debug) is now written #[derive(Debug)].
  • Abstract OS-specific string types, std::ff::{OsString, OsStr}, provide strings in platform-specific encodings for easier interop with system APIs. RFC.
  • The boxed::into_raw and Box::from_raw functions convert between Box<T> and *mut T, a common pattern for creating raw pointers.

• Tooling

  • Certain long error messages of the form 'expected foo found bar' are now split neatly across multiple lines. Examples in the PR.
  • On Unix Rust can be uninstalled by running /usr/local/lib/rustlib/uninstall.sh.
  • The #[rustc_on_unimplemented] attribute, requiring the 'on_unimplemented' feature, lets rustc display custom error messages when a trait is expected to be implemented for a type but is not.

• Misc

  • Rust is tested against a LALR grammar, which parses almost all the Rust files that rustc does.

Version 1.0.0-alpha (2015-01-09)

• ~2400 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Highlights

  • The language itself is considered feature complete for 1.0, though there will be many usability improvements and bugfixes before the final release.
  • Nearly 50% of the public API surface of the standard library has been declared 'stable'. Those interfaces are unlikely to change before 1.0.
  • The long-running debate over integer types has been settled: Rust will ship with types named isize and usize, rather than int and uint, for pointer-sized integers. Guidelines will be rolled out during the alpha cycle.
  • Most crates that are not std have been moved out of the Rust distribution into the Cargo ecosystem so they can evolve separately and don't need to be stabilized as quickly, including 'time', 'getopts', 'num', 'regex', and 'term'.
  • Documentation continues to be expanded with more API coverage, more examples, and more in-depth explanations. The guides have been consolidated into The Rust Programming Language.
  • "Rust By Example" is now maintained by the Rust team.
  • All official Rust binary installers now come with Cargo, the Rust package manager.

• Language

  • Closures have been completely redesigned to be implemented in terms of traits, can now be used as generic type bounds and thus monomorphized and inlined, or via an opaque pointer (boxed) as in the old system. The new system is often referred to as 'unboxed' closures.
  • Traits now support associated types, allowing families of related types to be defined together and used generically in powerful ways.
  • Enum variants are namespaced by their type names.
  • where clauses provide a more versatile and attractive syntax for specifying generic bounds, though the previous syntax remains valid.
  • Rust again picks a fallback (either i32 or f64) for uninferred numeric types.
  • Rust no longer has a runtime of any description, and only supports OS threads, not green threads.
  • At long last, Rust has been overhauled for 'dynamically-sized types' (DST), which integrates 'fat pointers' (object types, arrays, and str) more deeply into the type system, making it more consistent.
  • Rust now has a general range syntax, i..j, i.., and ..j that produce range types and which, when combined with the Index operator and multidispatch, leads to a convenient slice notation, [i..j].
  • The new range syntax revealed an ambiguity in the fixed-length array syntax, so now fixed length arrays are written [T; N].
  • The Copy trait is no longer implemented automatically. Unsafe pointers no longer implement Sync and Send so types containing them don't automatically either. Sync and Send are now 'unsafe traits' so one can "forcibly" implement them via unsafe impl if a type confirms to the requirements for them even though the internals do not (e.g. structs containing unsafe pointers like Arc). These changes are intended to prevent some footguns and are collectively known as opt-in built-in traits (though Sync and Send will soon become pure library types unknown to the compiler).
  • Operator traits now take their operands by value, and comparison traits can use multidispatch to compare one type against multiple other types, allowing e.g. String to be compared with &str.
  • if let and while let are no longer feature-gated.
  • Rust has adopted a more uniform syntax for escaping unicode characters.
  • macro_rules! has been declared stable. Though it is a flawed system it is sufficiently popular that it must be usable for 1.0. Effort has gone into future-proofing it in ways that will allow other macro systems to be developed in parallel, and won't otherwise impact the evolution of the language.
  • The prelude has been pared back significantly such that it is the minimum necessary to support the most pervasive code patterns, and through generalized where clauses many of the prelude extension traits have been consolidated.
  • Rust's rudimentary reflection has been removed, as it incurred too much code generation for little benefit.
  • Struct variants are no longer feature-gated.
  • Trait bounds can be polymorphic over lifetimes. Also known as 'higher-ranked trait bounds', this crucially allows unboxed closures to work.
  • Macros invocations surrounded by parens or square brackets and not terminated by a semicolon are parsed as expressions, which makes expressions like vec![1i32, 2, 3].len() work as expected.
  • Trait objects now implement their traits automatically, and traits that can be coerced to objects now must be object safe.
  • Automatically deriving traits is now done with #[derive(...)] not #[deriving(...)] for consistency with other naming conventions.
  • Importing the containing module or enum at the same time as items or variants they contain is now done with self instead of mod, as in use foo::{self, bar}
  • Glob imports are no longer feature-gated.
  • The box operator and box patterns have been feature-gated pending a redesign. For now unique boxes should be allocated like other containers, with Box::new.

• Libraries

  • A series of efforts to establish conventions for collections types has resulted in API improvements throughout the standard library.
  • New APIs for error handling provide ergonomic interop between error types, and new conventions describe more clearly the recommended error handling strategies in Rust.
  • The fail! macro has been renamed to panic! so that it is easier to discuss failure in the context of error handling without making clarifications as to whether you are referring to the 'fail' macro or failure more generally.
  • On Linux, OsRng prefers the new, more reliable getrandom syscall when available.
  • The 'serialize' crate has been renamed 'rustc-serialize' and moved out of the distribution to Cargo. Although it is widely used now, it is expected to be superseded in the near future.
  • The Show formatter, typically implemented with #[derive(Show)] is now requested with the {:?} specifier and is intended for use by all types, for uses such as println! debugging. The new String formatter must be implemented by hand, uses the {} specifier, and is intended for full-fidelity conversions of things that can logically be represented as strings.

• Tooling

  • Flexible target specification allows rustc's code generation to be configured to support otherwise-unsupported platforms.
  • Rust comes with rust-gdb and rust-lldb scripts that launch their respective debuggers with Rust-appropriate pretty-printing.
  • The Windows installation of Rust is distributed with the MinGW components currently required to link binaries on that platform.

• Misc

  • Nullable enum optimizations have been extended to more types so that e.g. Option<Vec<T>> and Option<String> take up no more space than the inner types themselves.
  • Work has begun on supporting AArch64.

Version 0.12.0 (2014-10-09)

• ~1900 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Highlights

  • The introductory documentation (now called The Rust Guide) has been completely rewritten, as have a number of supplementary guides.
  • Rust's package manager, Cargo, continues to improve and is sometimes considered to be quite awesome.
  • Many API's in std have been reviewed and updated for consistency with the in-development Rust coding guidelines. The standard library documentation tracks stabilization progress.
  • Minor libraries have been moved out-of-tree to the rust-lang org on GitHub: uuid, semver, glob, num, hexfloat, fourcc. They can be installed with Cargo.
  • Lifetime elision allows lifetime annotations to be left off of function declarations in many common scenarios.
  • Rust now works on 64-bit Windows.

• Language

  • Indexing can be overloaded with the Index and IndexMut traits.
  • The if let construct takes a branch only if the let pattern matches, currently behind the 'if_let' feature gate.
  • 'where clauses', a more flexible syntax for specifying trait bounds that is more aesthetic, have been added for traits and free functions. Where clauses will in the future make it possible to constrain associated types, which would be impossible with the existing syntax.
  • A new slicing syntax (e.g. [0..4]) has been introduced behind the 'slicing_syntax' feature gate, and can be overloaded with the Slice or SliceMut traits.
  • The syntax for matching of sub-slices has been changed to use a postfix .. instead of prefix (.e.g. [a, b, c..]), for consistency with other uses of .. and to future-proof potential additional uses of the syntax.
  • The syntax for matching inclusive ranges in patterns has changed from 0..3 to 0...4 to be consistent with the exclusive range syntax for slicing.
  • Matching of sub-slices in non-tail positions (e.g. [a.., b, c]) has been put behind the 'advanced_slice_patterns' feature gate and may be removed in the future.
  • Components of tuples and tuple structs can be extracted using the value.0 syntax, currently behind the tuple_indexing feature gate.
  • The #[crate_id] attribute is no longer supported; versioning is handled by the package manager.
  • Renaming crate imports are now written extern crate foo as bar instead of extern crate bar = foo.
  • Renaming use statements are now written use foo as bar instead of use bar = foo.
  • let and match bindings and argument names in macros are now hygienic.
  • The new, more efficient, closure types ('unboxed closures') have been added under a feature gate, 'unboxed_closures'. These will soon replace the existing closure types, once higher-ranked trait lifetimes are added to the language.
  • move has been added as a keyword, for indicating closures that capture by value.
  • Mutation and assignment is no longer allowed in pattern guards.
  • Generic structs and enums can now have trait bounds.
  • The Share trait is now called Sync to free up the term 'shared' to refer to 'shared reference' (the default reference type.
  • Dynamically-sized types have been mostly implemented, unifying the behavior of fat-pointer types with the rest of the type system.
  • As part of dynamically-sized types, the Sized trait has been introduced, which qualifying types implement by default, and which type parameters expect by default. To specify that a type parameter does not need to be sized, write <Sized? T>. Most types are Sized, notable exceptions being unsized arrays ([T]) and trait types.
  • Closures can return !, as in || -> ! or proc() -> !.
  • Lifetime bounds can now be applied to type parameters and object types.
  • The old, reference counted GC type, Gc<T> which was once denoted by the @ sigil, has finally been removed. GC will be revisited in the future.

• Libraries

  • Library documentation has been improved for a number of modules.
  • Bit-vectors, collections::bitv has been modernized.
  • The url crate is deprecated in favor of http://github.com/servo/rust-url, which can be installed with Cargo.
  • Most I/O stream types can be cloned and subsequently closed from a different thread.
  • A std::time::Duration type has been added for use in I/O methods that rely on timers, as well as in the 'time' crate's Timespec arithmetic.
  • The runtime I/O abstraction layer that enabled the green thread scheduler to do non-thread-blocking I/O has been removed, along with the libuv-based implementation employed by the green thread scheduler. This will greatly simplify the future I/O work.
  • collections::btree has been rewritten to have a more idiomatic and efficient design.

• Tooling

  • rustdoc output now indicates the stability levels of API's.
  • The --crate-name flag can specify the name of the crate being compiled, like #[crate_name].
  • The -C metadata specifies additional metadata to hash into symbol names, and -C extra-filename specifies additional information to put into the output filename, for use by the package manager for versioning.
  • debug info generation has continued to improve and should be more reliable under both gdb and lldb.
  • rustc has experimental support for compiling in parallel using the -C codegen-units flag.
  • rustc no longer encodes rpath information into binaries by default.

• Misc

  • Stack usage has been optimized with LLVM lifetime annotations.
  • Official Rust binaries on Linux are more compatible with older kernels and distributions, built on CentOS 5.10.

Version 0.11.0 (2014-07-02)

• ~1700 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Language

  • ~[T] has been removed from the language. This type is superseded by the Vec type.
  • ~str has been removed from the language. This type is superseded by the String type.
  • ~T has been removed from the language. This type is superseded by the Box type.
  • @T has been removed from the language. This type is superseded by the standard library's std::gc::Gc type.
  • Struct fields are now all private by default.
  • Vector indices and shift amounts are both required to be a uint instead of any integral type.
  • Byte character, byte string, and raw byte string literals are now all supported by prefixing the normal literal with a b.
  • Multiple ABIs are no longer allowed in an ABI string
  • The syntax for lifetimes on closures/procedures has been tweaked slightly: <'a>|A, B|: 'b + K -> T
  • Floating point modulus has been removed from the language; however it is still provided by a library implementation.
  • Private enum variants are now disallowed.
  • The priv keyword has been removed from the language.
  • A closure can no longer be invoked through a &-pointer.
  • The use foo, bar, baz; syntax has been removed from the language.
  • The transmute intrinsic no longer works on type parameters.
  • Statics now allow blocks/items in their definition.
  • Trait bounds are separated from objects with + instead of : now.
  • Objects can no longer be read while they are mutably borrowed.
  • The address of a static is now marked as insignificant unless the #[inline(never)] attribute is placed it.
  • The #[unsafe_destructor] attribute is now behind a feature gate.
  • Struct literals are no longer allowed in ambiguous positions such as if, while, match, and for..in.
  • Declaration of lang items and intrinsics are now feature-gated by default.
  • Integral literals no longer default to int, and floating point literals no longer default to f64. Literals must be suffixed with an appropriate type if inference cannot determine the type of the literal.
  • The Box type is no longer implicitly borrowed to &mut T.
  • Procedures are now required to not capture borrowed references.

• Libraries

  • The standard library is now a "facade" over a number of underlying libraries. This means that development on the standard library should be speedier due to smaller crates, as well as a clearer line between all dependencies.
  • A new library, libcore, lives under the standard library's facade which is Rust's "0-assumption" library, suitable for embedded and kernel development for example.
  • A regex crate has been added to the standard distribution. This crate includes statically compiled regular expressions.
  • The unwrap/unwrap_err methods on Result require a Show bound for better error messages.
  • The return types of the std::comm primitives have been centralized around the Result type.
  • A number of I/O primitives have gained the ability to time out their operations.
  • A number of I/O primitives have gained the ability to close their reading/writing halves to cancel pending operations.
  • Reverse iterator methods have been removed in favor of rev() on their forward-iteration counterparts.
  • A bitflags! macro has been added to enable easy interop with C and management of bit flags.
  • A debug_assert! macro is now provided which is disabled when --cfg ndebug is passed to the compiler.
  • A graphviz crate has been added for creating .dot files.
  • The std::cast module has been migrated into std::mem.
  • The std::local_data api has been migrated from freestanding functions to being based on methods.
  • The Pod trait has been renamed to Copy.
  • jemalloc has been added as the default allocator for types.
  • The API for allocating memory has been changed to use proper alignment and sized deallocation
  • Connecting a TcpStream or binding a TcpListener is now based on a string address and a u16 port. This allows connecting to a hostname as opposed to an IP.
  • The Reader trait now contains a core method, read_at_least(), which correctly handles many repeated 0-length reads.
  • The process-spawning API is now centered around a builder-style Command struct.
  • The :? printing qualifier has been moved from the standard library to an external libdebug crate.
  • Eq/Ord have been renamed to PartialEq/PartialOrd. TotalEq/TotalOrd have been renamed to Eq/Ord.
  • The select/plural methods have been removed from format!. The escapes for { and } have also changed from { and } to {{ and }}, respectively.
  • The TaskBuilder API has been re-worked to be a true builder, and extension traits for spawning native/green tasks have been added.

• Tooling

  • All breaking changes to the language or libraries now have their commit message annotated with [breaking-change] to allow for easy discovery of breaking changes.
  • The compiler will now try to suggest how to annotate lifetimes if a lifetime-related error occurs.
  • Debug info continues to be improved greatly with general bug fixes and better support for situations like link time optimization (LTO).
  • Usage of syntax extensions when cross-compiling has been fixed.
  • Functionality equivalent to GCC & Clang's -ffunction-sections, -fdata-sections and --gc-sections has been enabled by default
  • The compiler is now stricter about where it will load module files from when a module is declared via mod foo;.
  • The #[phase(syntax)] attribute has been renamed to #[phase(plugin)]. Syntax extensions are now discovered via a "plugin registrar" type which will be extended in the future to other various plugins.
  • Lints have been restructured to allow for dynamically loadable lints.
  • A number of rustdoc improvements:
    • The HTML output has been visually redesigned.
    • Markdown is now powered by hoedown instead of sundown.
    • Searching heuristics have been greatly improved.
    • The search index has been reduced in size by a great amount.
    • Cross-crate documentation via pub use has been greatly improved.
    • Primitive types are now hyperlinked and documented.
  • Documentation has been moved from static.rust-lang.org/doc to doc.rust-lang.org
  • A new sandbox, play.rust-lang.org, is available for running and sharing rust code examples on-line.
  • Unused attributes are now more robustly warned about.
  • The dead_code lint now warns about unused struct fields.
  • Cross-compiling to iOS is now supported.
  • Cross-compiling to mipsel is now supported.
  • Stability attributes are now inherited by default and no longer apply to intra-crate usage, only inter-crate usage.
  • Error message related to non-exhaustive match expressions have been greatly improved.

Version 0.10 (2014-04-03)

• ~1500 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Language

  • A new RFC process is now in place for modifying the language.
  • Patterns with @-pointers have been removed from the language.
  • Patterns with unique vectors (~[T]) have been removed from the language.
  • Patterns with unique strings (~str) have been removed from the language.
  • @str has been removed from the language.
  • @[T] has been removed from the language.
  • @self has been removed from the language.
  • @Trait has been removed from the language.
  • Headers on ~ allocations which contain @ boxes inside the type for reference counting have been removed.
  • The semantics around the lifetimes of temporary expressions have changed, see #3511 and #11585 for more information.
  • Cross-crate syntax extensions are now possible, but feature gated. See #11151 for more information. This includes both macro_rules! macros as well as syntax extensions such as format!.
  • New lint modes have been added, and older ones have been turned on to be warn-by-default.
    • Unnecessary parentheses
    • Uppercase statics
    • Camel Case types
    • Uppercase variables
    • Publicly visible private types
    • #[deriving] with raw pointers
  • Unsafe functions can no longer be coerced to closures.
  • Various obscure macros such as log_syntax! are now behind feature gates.
  • The #[simd] attribute is now behind a feature gate.
  • Visibility is no longer allowed on extern crate statements, and unnecessary visibility (priv) is no longer allowed on use statements.
  • Trailing commas are now allowed in argument lists and tuple patterns.
  • The do keyword has been removed, it is now a reserved keyword.
  • Default type parameters have been implemented, but are feature gated.
  • Borrowed variables through captures in closures are now considered soundly.
  • extern mod is now extern crate
  • The Freeze trait has been removed.
  • The Share trait has been added for types that can be shared among threads.
  • Labels in macros are now hygienic.
  • Expression/statement macro invocations can be delimited with {} now.
  • Treatment of types allowed in static mut locations has been tweaked.
  • The * and . operators are now overloadable through the Deref and DerefMut traits.
  • ~Trait and proc no longer have Send bounds by default.
  • Partial type hints are now supported with the _ type marker.
  • An Unsafe type was introduced for interior mutability. It is now considered undefined to transmute from &T to &mut T without using the Unsafe type.
  • The #[linkage] attribute was implemented for extern statics/functions.
  • The inner attribute syntax has changed from #[foo]; to #![foo].
  • Pod was renamed to Copy.

• Libraries

  • The libextra library has been removed. It has now been decomposed into component libraries with smaller and more focused nuggets of functionality. The full list of libraries can be found on the documentation index page.
  • std: std::condition has been removed. All I/O errors are now propagated through the Result type. In order to assist with error handling, a try! macro for unwrapping errors with an early return and a lint for unused results has been added. See #12039 for more information.
  • std: The vec module has been renamed to slice.
  • std: A new vector type, Vec<T>, has been added in preparation for DST. This will become the only growable vector in the future.
  • std: std::io now has more public re-exports. Types such as BufferedReader are now found at std::io::BufferedReader instead of std::io::buffered::BufferedReader.
  • std: print and println are no longer in the prelude, the print! and println! macros are intended to be used instead.
  • std: Rc now has a Weak pointer for breaking cycles, and it no longer attempts to statically prevent cycles.
  • std: The standard distribution is adopting the policy of pushing failure to the user rather than failing in libraries. Many functions (such as slice::last()) now return Option<T> instead of T + failing.
  • std: fmt::Default has been renamed to fmt::Show, and it now has a new deriving mode: #[deriving(Show)].
  • std: ToStr is now implemented for all types implementing Show.
  • std: The formatting trait methods now take &self instead of &T
  • std: The invert() method on iterators has been renamed to rev()
  • std: std::num has seen a reduction in the genericity of its traits, consolidating functionality into a few core traits.
  • std: Backtraces are now printed on task failure if the environment variable RUST_BACKTRACE is present.
  • std: Naming conventions for iterators have been standardized. More details can be found on the wiki's style guide.
  • std: eof() has been removed from the Reader trait. Specific types may still implement the function.
  • std: Networking types are now cloneable to allow simultaneous reads/writes.
  • std: assert_approx_eq! has been removed
  • std: The e and E formatting specifiers for floats have been added to print them in exponential notation.
  • std: The Times trait has been removed
  • std: Indications of variance and opting out of builtin bounds is done through marker types in std::kinds::marker now
  • std: hash has been rewritten, IterBytes has been removed, and #[deriving(Hash)] is now possible.
  • std: SharedChan has been removed, Sender is now cloneable.
  • std: Chan and Port were renamed to Sender and Receiver.
  • std: Chan::new is now channel().
  • std: A new synchronous channel type has been implemented.
  • std: A select! macro is now provided for selecting over Receivers.
  • std: hashmap and trie have been moved to libcollections
  • std: run has been rolled into io::process
  • std: assert_eq! now uses {} instead of {:?}
  • std: The equality and comparison traits have seen some reorganization.
  • std: rand has moved to librand.
  • std: to_{lower,upper}case has been implemented for char.
  • std: Logging has been moved to liblog.
  • collections: HashMap has been rewritten for higher performance and less memory usage.
  • native: The default runtime is now libnative. If libgreen is desired, it can be booted manually. The runtime guide has more information and examples.
  • native: All I/O functionality except signals has been implemented.
  • green: Task spawning with libgreen has been optimized with stack caching and various trimming of code.
  • green: Tasks spawned by libgreen now have an unmapped guard page.
  • sync: The extra::sync module has been updated to modern rust (and moved to the sync library), tweaking and improving various interfaces while dropping redundant functionality.
  • sync: A new Barrier type has been added to the sync library.
  • sync: An efficient mutex for native and green tasks has been implemented.
  • serialize: The base64 module has seen some improvement. It treats newlines better, has non-string error values, and has seen general cleanup.
  • fourcc: A fourcc! macro was introduced
  • hexfloat: A hexfloat! macro was implemented for specifying floats via a hexadecimal literal.

• Tooling

  • rustpkg has been deprecated and removed from the main repository. Its replacement, cargo, is under development.
  • Nightly builds of rust are now available
  • The memory usage of rustc has been improved many times throughout this release cycle.
  • The build process supports disabling rpath support for the rustc binary itself.
  • Code generation has improved in some cases, giving more information to the LLVM optimization passes to enable more extensive optimizations.
  • Debuginfo compatibility with lldb on OSX has been restored.
  • The master branch is now gated on an android bot, making building for android much more reliable.
  • Output flags have been centralized into one --emit flag.
  • Crate type flags have been centralized into one --crate-type flag.
  • Codegen flags have been consolidated behind a -C flag.
  • Linking against outdated crates now has improved error messages.
  • Error messages with lifetimes will often suggest how to annotate the function to fix the error.
  • Many more types are documented in the standard library, and new guides were written.
  • Many rustdoc improvements:
    • code blocks are syntax highlighted.
    • render standalone markdown files.
    • the --test flag tests all code blocks by default.
    • exported macros are displayed.
    • re-exported types have their documentation inlined at the location of the first re-export.
    • search works across crates that have been rendered to the same output directory.

Version 0.9 (2014-01-09)

• ~1800 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Language

  • The float type has been removed. Use f32 or f64 instead.
  • A new facility for enabling experimental features (feature gating) has been added, using the crate-level #[feature(foo)] attribute.
  • Managed boxes (@) are now behind a feature gate (#[feature(managed_boxes)]) in preparation for future removal. Use the standard library's Gc or Rc types instead.
  • @mut has been removed. Use std::cell::{Cell, RefCell} instead.
  • Jumping back to the top of a loop is now done with continue instead of loop.
  • Strings can no longer be mutated through index assignment.
  • Raw strings can be created via the basic r"foo" syntax or with matched hash delimiters, as in r###"foo"###.
  • ~fn is now written proc (args) -> retval { ... } and may only be called once.
  • The &fn type is now written |args| -> ret to match the literal form.
  • @fns have been removed.
  • do only works with procs in order to make it obvious what the cost of do is.
  • Single-element tuple-like structs can no longer be dereferenced to obtain the inner value. A more comprehensive solution for overloading the dereference operator will be provided in the future.
  • The #[link(...)] attribute has been replaced with #[crate_id = "name#vers"].
  • Empty impls must be terminated with empty braces and may not be terminated with a semicolon.
  • Keywords are no longer allowed as lifetime names; the self lifetime no longer has any special meaning.
  • The old fmt! string formatting macro has been removed.
  • printf! and printfln! (old-style formatting) removed in favor of print! and println!.
  • mut works in patterns now, as in let (mut x, y) = (1, 2);.
  • The extern mod foo (name = "bar") syntax has been removed. Use extern mod foo = "bar" instead.
  • New reserved keywords: alignof, offsetof, sizeof.
  • Macros can have attributes.
  • Macros can expand to items with attributes.
  • Macros can expand to multiple items.
  • The asm! macro is feature-gated (#[feature(asm)]).
  • Comments may be nested.
  • Values automatically coerce to trait objects they implement, without an explicit as.
  • Enum discriminants are no longer an entire word but as small as needed to contain all the variants. The repr attribute can be used to override the discriminant size, as in #[repr(int)] for integer-sized, and #[repr(C)] to match C enums.
  • Non-string literals are not allowed in attributes (they never worked).
  • The FFI now supports variadic functions.
  • Octal numeric literals, as in 0o7777.
  • The concat! syntax extension performs compile-time string concatenation.
  • The #[fixed_stack_segment] and #[rust_stack] attributes have been removed as Rust no longer uses segmented stacks.
  • Non-ascii identifiers are feature-gated (#[feature(non_ascii_idents)]).
  • Ignoring all fields of an enum variant or tuple-struct is done with .., not *; ignoring remaining fields of a struct is also done with .., not _; ignoring a slice of a vector is done with .., not .._.
  • rustc supports the "win64" calling convention via extern "win64".
  • rustc supports the "system" calling convention, which defaults to the preferred convention for the target platform, "stdcall" on 32-bit Windows, "C" elsewhere.
  • The type_overflow lint (default: warn) checks literals for overflow.
  • The unsafe_block lint (default: allow) checks for usage of unsafe.
  • The attribute_usage lint (default: warn) warns about unknown attributes.
  • The unknown_features lint (default: warn) warns about unknown feature gates.
  • The dead_code lint (default: warn) checks for dead code.
  • Rust libraries can be linked statically to one another
  • #[link_args] is behind the link_args feature gate.
  • Native libraries are now linked with #[link(name = "foo")]
  • Native libraries can be statically linked to a rust crate (#[link(name = "foo", kind = "static")]).
  • Native OS X frameworks are now officially supported (#[link(name = "foo", kind = "framework")]).
  • The #[thread_local] attribute creates thread-local (not task-local) variables. Currently behind the thread_local feature gate.
  • The return keyword may be used in closures.
  • Types that can be copied via a memcpy implement the Pod kind.
  • The cfg attribute can now be used on struct fields and enum variants.

• Libraries

  • std: The option and result API's have been overhauled to make them simpler, more consistent, and more composable.
  • std: The entire std::io module has been replaced with one that is more comprehensive and that properly interfaces with the underlying scheduler. File, TCP, UDP, Unix sockets, pipes, and timers are all implemented.
  • std: io::util contains a number of useful implementations of Reader and Writer, including NullReader, NullWriter, ZeroReader, TeeReader.
  • std: The reference counted pointer type extra::rc moved into std.
  • std: The Gc type in the gc module will replace @ (it is currently just a wrapper around it).
  • std: The Either type has been removed.
  • std: fmt::Default can be implemented for any type to provide default formatting to the format! macro, as in format!("{}", myfoo).
  • std: The rand API continues to be tweaked.
  • std: The rust_begin_unwind function, useful for inserting breakpoints on failure in gdb, is now named rust_fail.
  • std: The each_key and each_value methods on HashMap have been replaced by the keys and values iterators.
  • std: Functions dealing with type size and alignment have moved from the sys module to the mem module.
  • std: The path module was written and API changed.
  • std: str::from_utf8 has been changed to cast instead of allocate.
  • std: starts_with and ends_with methods added to vectors via the ImmutableEqVector trait, which is in the prelude.
  • std: Vectors can be indexed with the get_opt method, which returns None if the index is out of bounds.
  • std: Task failure no longer propagates between tasks, as the model was complex, expensive, and incompatible with thread-based tasks.
  • std: The Any type can be used for dynamic typing.
  • std: ~Any can be passed to the fail! macro and retrieved via task::try.
  • std: Methods that produce iterators generally do not have an _iter suffix now.
  • std: cell::Cell and cell::RefCell can be used to introduce mutability roots (mutable fields, etc.). Use instead of e.g. @mut.
  • std: util::ignore renamed to prelude::drop.
  • std: Slices have sort and sort_by methods via the MutableVector trait.
  • std: vec::raw has seen a lot of cleanup and API changes.
  • std: The standard library no longer includes any C++ code, and very minimal C, eliminating the dependency on libstdc++.
  • std: Runtime scheduling and I/O functionality has been factored out into extensible interfaces and is now implemented by two different crates: libnative, for native threading and I/O; and libgreen, for green threading and I/O. This paves the way for using the standard library in more limited embedded environments.
  • std: The comm module has been rewritten to be much faster, have a simpler, more consistent API, and to work for both native and green threading.
  • std: All libuv dependencies have been moved into the rustuv crate.
  • native: New implementations of runtime scheduling on top of OS threads.
  • native: New native implementations of TCP, UDP, file I/O, process spawning, and other I/O.
  • green: The green thread scheduler and message passing types are almost entirely lock-free.
  • extra: The flatpipes module had bitrotted and was removed.
  • extra: All crypto functions have been removed and Rust now has a policy of not reimplementing crypto in the standard library. In the future crypto will be provided by external crates with bindings to established libraries.
  • extra: c_vec has been modernized.
  • extra: The sort module has been removed. Use the sort method on mutable slices.

• Tooling

  • The rust and rusti commands have been removed, due to lack of maintenance.
  • rustdoc was completely rewritten.
  • rustdoc can test code examples in documentation.
  • rustpkg can test packages with the argument, 'test'.
  • rustpkg supports arbitrary dependencies, including C libraries.
  • rustc's support for generating debug info is improved again.
  • rustc has better error reporting for unbalanced delimiters.
  • rustc's JIT support was removed due to bitrot.
  • Executables and static libraries can be built with LTO (-Z lto)
  • rustc adds a --dep-info flag for communicating dependencies to build tools.

Version 0.8 (2013-09-26)

• ~2200 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Language

  • The for loop syntax has changed to work with the Iterator trait.
  • At long last, unwinding works on Windows.
  • Default methods are ready for use.
  • Many trait inheritance bugs fixed.
  • Owned and borrowed trait objects work more reliably.
  • copy is no longer a keyword. It has been replaced by the Clone trait.
  • rustc can omit emission of code for the debug! macro if it is passed --cfg ndebug
  • mod.rs is now "blessed". When loading mod foo;, rustc will now look for foo.rs, then foo/mod.rs, and will generate an error when both are present.
  • Strings no longer contain trailing nulls. The new std::c_str module provides new mechanisms for converting to C strings.
  • The type of foreign functions is now extern "C" fn instead of `*u8'.
  • The FFI has been overhauled such that foreign functions are called directly, instead of through a stack-switching wrapper.
  • Calling a foreign function must be done through a Rust function with the #[fixed_stack_segment] attribute.
  • The externfn! macro can be used to declare both a foreign function and a #[fixed_stack_segment] wrapper at once.
  • pub and priv modifiers on extern blocks are no longer parsed.
  • unsafe is no longer allowed on extern fns - they are all unsafe.
  • priv is disallowed everywhere except for struct fields and enum variants.
  • &T (besides &'static T) is no longer allowed in @T.
  • ref bindings in irrefutable patterns work correctly now.
  • char is now prevented from containing invalid code points.
  • Casting to bool is no longer allowed.
  • \0 is now accepted as an escape in chars and strings.
  • yield is a reserved keyword.
  • typeof is a reserved keyword.
  • Crates may be imported by URL with extern mod foo = "url";.
  • Explicit enum discriminants may be given as uints as in enum E { V = 0u }
  • Static vectors can be initialized with repeating elements, e.g. static foo: [u8, .. 100]: [0, .. 100];.
  • Static structs can be initialized with functional record update, e.g. static foo: Foo = Foo { a: 5, .. bar };.
  • cfg! can be used to conditionally execute code based on the crate configuration, similarly to #[cfg(...)].
  • The unnecessary_qualification lint detects unneeded module prefixes (default: allow).
  • Arithmetic operations have been implemented on the SIMD types in std::unstable::simd.
  • Exchange allocation headers were removed, reducing memory usage.
  • format! implements a completely new, extensible, and higher-performance string formatting system. It will replace fmt!.
  • print! and println! write formatted strings (using the format! extension) to stdout.
  • write! and writeln! write formatted strings (using the format! extension) to the new Writers in std::rt::io.
  • The library section in which a function or static is placed may be specified with #[link_section = "..."].
  • The proto! syntax extension for defining bounded message protocols was removed.
  • macro_rules! is hygienic for let declarations.
  • The #[export_name] attribute specifies the name of a symbol.
  • unreachable! can be used to indicate unreachable code, and fails if executed.

• Libraries

  • std: Transitioned to the new runtime, written in Rust.
  • std: Added an experimental I/O library, rt::io, based on the new runtime.
  • std: A new generic range function was added to the prelude, replacing uint::range and friends.
  • std: range_rev no longer exists. Since range is an iterator it can be reversed with range(lo, hi).invert().
  • std: The chain method on option renamed to and_then; unwrap_or_default renamed to unwrap_or.
  • std: The iterator module was renamed to iter.
  • std: Integral types now support the checked_add, checked_sub, and checked_mul operations for detecting overflow.
  • std: Many methods in str, vec, option, result` were renamed for consistency.
  • std: Methods are standardizing on conventions for casting methods: to_foo for copying, into_foo for moving, as_foo for temporary and cheap casts.
  • std: The CString type in c_str provides new ways to convert to and from C strings.
  • std: DoubleEndedIterator can yield elements in two directions.
  • std: The mut_split method on vectors partitions an &mut [T] into two splices.
  • std: str::from_bytes renamed to str::from_utf8.
  • std: pop_opt and shift_opt methods added to vectors.
  • std: The task-local data interface no longer uses @, and keys are no longer function pointers.
  • std: The swap_unwrap method of Option renamed to take_unwrap.
  • std: Added SharedPort to comm.
  • std: Eq has a default method for ne; only eq is required in implementations.
  • std: Ord has default methods for le, gt and ge; only lt is required in implementations.
  • std: is_utf8 performance is improved, impacting many string functions.
  • std: os::MemoryMap provides cross-platform mmap.
  • std: ptr::offset is now unsafe, but also more optimized. Offsets that are not 'in-bounds' are considered undefined.
  • std: Many freestanding functions in vec removed in favor of methods.
  • std: Many freestanding functions on scalar types removed in favor of methods.
  • std: Many options to task builders were removed since they don't make sense in the new scheduler design.
  • std: More containers implement FromIterator so can be created by the collect method.
  • std: More complete atomic types in unstable::atomics.
  • std: comm::PortSet removed.
  • std: Mutating methods in the Set and Map traits have been moved into the MutableSet and MutableMap traits. Container::is_empty, Map::contains_key, MutableMap::insert, and MutableMap::remove have default implementations.
  • std: Various from_str functions were removed in favor of a generic from_str which is available in the prelude.
  • std: util::unreachable removed in favor of the unreachable! macro.
  • extra: dlist, the doubly-linked list was modernized.
  • extra: Added a hex module with ToHex and FromHex traits.
  • extra: Added glob module, replacing std::os::glob.
  • extra: rope was removed.
  • extra: deque was renamed to ringbuf. RingBuf implements Deque.
  • extra: net, and timer were removed. The experimental replacements are std::rt::io::net and std::rt::io::timer.
  • extra: Iterators implemented for SmallIntMap.
  • extra: Iterators implemented for Bitv and BitvSet.
  • extra: SmallIntSet removed. Use BitvSet.
  • extra: Performance of JSON parsing greatly improved.
  • extra: semver updated to SemVer 2.0.0.
  • extra: term handles more terminals correctly.
  • extra: dbg module removed.
  • extra: par module removed.
  • extra: future was cleaned up, with some method renames.
  • extra: Most free functions in getopts were converted to methods.

• Other

  • rustc's debug info generation (-Z debug-info) is greatly improved.
  • rustc accepts --target-cpu to compile to a specific CPU architecture, similarly to gcc's --march flag.
  • rustc's performance compiling small crates is much better.
  • rustpkg has received many improvements.
  • rustpkg supports git tags as package IDs.
  • rustpkg builds into target-specific directories so it can be used for cross-compiling.
  • The number of concurrent test tasks is controlled by the environment variable RUST_TEST_TASKS.
  • The test harness can now report metrics for benchmarks.
  • All tools have man pages.
  • Programs compiled with --test now support the -h and --help flags.
  • The runtime uses jemalloc for allocations.
  • Segmented stacks are temporarily disabled as part of the transition to the new runtime. Stack overflows are possible!
  • A new documentation backend, rustdoc_ng, is available for use. It is still invoked through the normal rustdoc command.

Version 0.7 (2013-07-03)

• ~2000 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Language

  • impls no longer accept a visibility qualifier. Put them on methods instead.
  • The borrow checker has been rewritten with flow-sensitivity, fixing many bugs and inconveniences.
  • The self parameter no longer implicitly means &'self self, and can be explicitly marked with a lifetime.
  • Overloadable compound operators (+=, etc.) have been temporarily removed due to bugs.
  • The for loop protocol now requires for-iterators to return bool so they compose better.
  • The Durable trait is replaced with the 'static bounds.
  • Trait default methods work more often.
  • Structs with the #[packed] attribute have byte alignment and no padding between fields.
  • Type parameters bound by Copy must now be copied explicitly with the copy keyword.
  • It is now illegal to move out of a dereferenced unsafe pointer.
  • Option<~T> is now represented as a nullable pointer.
  • @mut does dynamic borrow checks correctly.
  • The main function is only detected at the topmost level of the crate. The #[main] attribute is still valid anywhere.
  • Struct fields may no longer be mutable. Use inherited mutability.
  • The #[no_send] attribute makes a type that would otherwise be Send, not.
  • The #[no_freeze] attribute makes a type that would otherwise be Freeze, not.
  • Unbounded recursion will abort the process after reaching the limit specified by the RUST_MAX_STACK environment variable (default: 1GB).
  • The vecs_implicitly_copyable lint mode has been removed. Vectors are never implicitly copyable.
  • #[static_assert] makes compile-time assertions about static bools.
  • At long last, 'argument modes' no longer exist.
  • The rarely used use mod statement no longer exists.

• Syntax extensions

  • fail! and assert! accept ~str, &'static str or fmt!-style argument list.
  • Encodable, Decodable, Ord, TotalOrd, TotalEq, DeepClone, Rand, Zero and ToStr can all be automatically derived with #[deriving(...)].
  • The bytes! macro returns a vector of bytes for string, u8, char, and unsuffixed integer literals.

• Libraries

  • The core crate was renamed to std.
  • The std crate was renamed to extra.
  • More and improved documentation.
  • std: iterator module for external iterator objects.
  • Many old-style (internal, higher-order function) iterators replaced by implementations of Iterator.
  • std: Many old internal vector and string iterators, incl. any, all. removed.
  • std: The finalize method of Drop renamed to drop.
  • std: The drop method now takes &mut self instead of &self.
  • std: The prelude no longer re-exports any modules, only types and traits.
  • std: Prelude additions: print, println, FromStr, ApproxEq, Equiv, Iterator, IteratorUtil, many numeric traits, many tuple traits.
  • std: New numeric traits: Fractional, Real, RealExt, Integer, Ratio, Algebraic, Trigonometric, Exponential, Primitive.
  • std: Tuple traits and accessors defined for up to 12-tuples, e.g. (0, 1, 2).n2() or (0, 1, 2).n2_ref().
  • std: Many types implement Clone.
  • std: path type renamed to Path.
  • std: mut module and Mut type removed.
  • std: Many standalone functions removed in favor of methods and iterators in vec, str. In the future methods will also work as functions.
  • std: reinterpret_cast removed. Use transmute.
  • std: ascii string handling in std::ascii.
  • std: Rand is implemented for ~/@.
  • std: run module for spawning processes overhauled.
  • std: Various atomic types added to unstable::atomic.
  • std: Various types implement Zero.
  • std: LinearMap and LinearSet renamed to HashMap and HashSet.
  • std: Borrowed pointer functions moved from ptr to borrow.
  • std: Added os::mkdir_recursive.
  • std: Added os::glob function performs filesystems globs.
  • std: FuzzyEq renamed to ApproxEq.
  • std: Map now defines pop and swap methods.
  • std: Cell constructors converted to static methods.
  • extra: rc module adds the reference counted pointers, Rc and RcMut.
  • extra: flate module moved from std to extra.
  • extra: fileinput module for iterating over a series of files.
  • extra: Complex number type and complex module.
  • extra: Rational number type and rational module.
  • extra: BigInt, BigUint implement numeric and comparison traits.
  • extra: term uses terminfo now, is more correct.
  • extra: arc functions converted to methods.
  • extra: Implementation of fixed output size variations of SHA-2.

• Tooling

  • unused_variable lint mode for unused variables (default: warn).
  • unused_unsafe lint mode for detecting unnecessary unsafe blocks (default: warn).
  • unused_mut lint mode for identifying unused mut qualifiers (default: warn).
  • dead_assignment lint mode for unread variables (default: warn).
  • unnecessary_allocation lint mode detects some heap allocations that are immediately borrowed so could be written without allocating (default: warn).
  • missing_doc lint mode (default: allow).
  • unreachable_code lint mode (default: warn).
  • The rusti command has been rewritten and a number of bugs addressed.
  • rustc outputs in color on more terminals.
  • rustc accepts a --link-args flag to pass arguments to the linker.
  • rustc accepts a -Z print-link-args flag for debugging linkage.
  • Compiling with -g will make the binary record information about dynamic borrowcheck failures for debugging.
  • rustdoc has a nicer stylesheet.
  • Various improvements to rustdoc.
  • Improvements to rustpkg (see the detailed release notes).

Version 0.6 (2013-04-03)

• ~2100 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Syntax changes

  • The self type parameter in traits is now spelled Self
  • The self parameter in trait and impl methods must now be explicitly named (for example: fn f(&self) { }). Implicit self is deprecated.
  • Static methods no longer require the static keyword and instead are distinguished by the lack of a self parameter
  • Replaced the Durable trait with the 'static lifetime
  • The old closure type syntax with the trailing sigil has been removed in favor of the more consistent leading sigil
  • super is a keyword, and may be prefixed to paths
  • Trait bounds are separated with + instead of whitespace
  • Traits are implemented with impl Trait for Type instead of impl Type: Trait
  • Lifetime syntax is now &'l foo instead of &l/foo
  • The export keyword has finally been removed
  • The move keyword has been removed (see "Semantic changes")
  • The interior mutability qualifier on vectors, [mut T], has been removed. Use &mut [T], etc.
  • mut is no longer valid in ~mut T. Use inherited mutability
  • fail is no longer a keyword. Use fail!()
  • assert is no longer a keyword. Use assert!()
  • log is no longer a keyword. use debug!, etc.
  • 1-tuples may be represented as (T,)
  • Struct fields may no longer be mut. Use inherited mutability, @mut T, core::mut or core::cell
  • extern mod { ... } is no longer valid syntax for foreign function modules. Use extern blocks: extern { ... }
  • Newtype enums removed. Use tuple-structs.
  • Trait implementations no longer support visibility modifiers
  • Pattern matching over vectors improved and expanded
  • const renamed to static to correspond to lifetime name, and make room for future static mut unsafe mutable globals.
  • Replaced #[deriving_eq] with #[deriving(Eq)], etc.
  • Clone implementations can be automatically generated with #[deriving(Clone)]
  • Casts to traits must use a pointer sigil, e.g. @foo as @Bar instead of foo as Bar.
  • Fixed length vector types are now written as [int, .. 3] instead of [int * 3].
  • Fixed length vector types can express the length as a constant expression. (ex: [int, .. GL_BUFFER_SIZE - 2])

• Semantic changes

  • Types with owned pointers or custom destructors move by default, eliminating the move keyword
  • All foreign functions are considered unsafe
  • &mut is now unaliasable
  • Writes to borrowed @mut pointers are prevented dynamically
  • () has size 0
  • The name of the main function can be customized using #[main]
  • The default type of an inferred closure is &fn instead of @fn
  • use statements may no longer be "chained" - they cannot import identifiers imported by previous use statements
  • use statements are crate relative, importing from the "top" of the crate by default. Paths may be prefixed with super:: or self:: to change the search behavior.
  • Method visibility is inherited from the implementation declaration
  • Structural records have been removed
  • Many more types can be used in static items, including enums 'static-lifetime pointers and vectors
  • Pattern matching over vectors improved and expanded
  • Typechecking of closure types has been overhauled to improve inference and eliminate unsoundness
  • Macros leave scope at the end of modules, unless that module is tagged with #[macro_escape]

• Libraries

  • Added big integers to std::bigint
  • Removed core::oldcomm module
  • Added pipe-based core::comm module
  • Numeric traits have been reorganized under core::num
  • vec::slice finally returns a slice
  • debug! and friends don't require a format string, e.g. debug!(Foo)
  • Containers reorganized around traits in core::container
  • core::dvec removed, ~[T] is a drop-in replacement
  • core::send_map renamed to core::hashmap
  • std::map removed; replaced with core::hashmap
  • std::treemap reimplemented as an owned balanced tree
  • std::deque and std::smallintmap reimplemented as owned containers
  • core::trie added as a fast ordered map for integer keys
  • Set types added to core::hashmap, core::trie and std::treemap
  • Ord split into Ord and TotalOrd. Ord is still used to overload the comparison operators, whereas TotalOrd is used by certain container types

• Other

  • Replaced the 'cargo' package manager with 'rustpkg'
  • Added all-purpose 'rust' tool
  • rustc --test now supports benchmarks with the #[bench] attribute
  • rustc now attempts to offer spelling suggestions
  • Improved support for ARM and Android
  • Preliminary MIPS backend
  • Improved foreign function ABI implementation for x86, x86_64
  • Various memory usage improvements
  • Rust code may be embedded in foreign code under limited circumstances
  • Inline assembler supported by new asm!() syntax extension.

Version 0.5 (2012-12-21)

• ~900 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Syntax changes

  • Removed <- move operator
  • Completed the transition from the #fmt extension syntax to fmt!
  • Removed old fixed length vector syntax - [T]/N
  • New token-based quasi-quoters, quote_tokens!, quote_expr!, etc.
  • Macros may now expand to items and statements
  • a.b() is always parsed as a method call, never as a field projection
  • Eq and IterBytes implementations can be automatically generated with #[deriving_eq] and #[deriving_iter_bytes] respectively
  • Removed the special crate language for .rc files
  • Function arguments may consist of any irrefutable pattern

• Semantic changes

  • & and ~ pointers may point to objects
  • Tuple structs - struct Foo(Bar, Baz). Will replace newtype enums.
  • Enum variants may be structs
  • Destructors can be added to all nominal types with the Drop trait
  • Structs and nullary enum variants may be constants
  • Values that cannot be implicitly copied are now automatically moved without writing move explicitly
  • &T may now be coerced to *T
  • Coercions happen in let statements as well as function calls
  • use statements now take crate-relative paths
  • The module and type namespaces have been merged so that static method names can be resolved under the trait in which they are declared

• Improved support for language features

  • Trait inheritance works in many scenarios
  • More support for explicit self arguments in methods - self, &self @self, and ~self all generally work as expected
  • Static methods work in more situations
  • Experimental: Traits may declare default methods for the implementations to use

• Libraries

  • New condition handling system in core::condition
  • Timsort added to std::sort
  • New priority queue, std::priority_queue
  • Pipes for serializable types, `std::flatpipes'
  • Serialization overhauled to be trait-based
  • Expanded getopts definitions
  • Moved futures to std
  • More functions are pure now
  • core::comm renamed to oldcomm. Still deprecated
  • rustdoc and cargo are libraries now

• Misc

  • Added a preliminary REPL, rusti
  • License changed from MIT to dual MIT/APL2

Version 0.4 (2012-10-15)

• ~2000 changes, numerous bugfixes

• Syntax

  • All keywords are now strict and may not be used as identifiers anywhere
  • Keyword removal: 'again', 'import', 'check', 'new', 'owned', 'send', 'of', 'with', 'to', 'class'.
  • Classes are replaced with simpler structs
  • Explicit method self types
  • ret became return and alt became match
  • import is now use; use is now extern mod`
  • extern mod { ... } is now extern { ... }
  • use mod is the recommended way to import modules
  • pub and priv replace deprecated export lists
  • The syntax of match pattern arms now uses fat arrow (=>)
  • main no longer accepts an args vector; use os::args instead

• Semantics

  • Trait implementations are now coherent, ala Haskell typeclasses
  • Trait methods may be static
  • Argument modes are deprecated
  • Borrowed pointers are much more mature and recommended for use
  • Strings and vectors in the static region are stored in constant memory
  • Typestate was removed
  • Resolution rewritten to be more reliable
  • Support for 'dual-mode' data structures (freezing and thawing)

• Libraries

  • Most binary operators can now be overloaded via the traits in `core::ops'
  • std::net::url for representing URLs
  • Sendable hash maps in core::send_map
  • `core::task' gained a (currently unsafe) task-local storage API

• Concurrency

  • An efficient new intertask communication primitive called the pipe, along with a number of higher-level channel types, in core::pipes
  • std::arc, an atomically reference counted, immutable, shared memory type
  • std::sync, various exotic synchronization tools based on arcs and pipes
  • Futures are now based on pipes and sendable
  • More robust linked task failure
  • Improved task builder API

• Other

  • Improved error reporting
  • Preliminary JIT support
  • Preliminary work on precise GC
  • Extensive architectural improvements to rustc
  • Begun a transition away from buggy C++-based reflection (shape) code to Rust-based (visitor) code
  • All hash functions and tables converted to secure, randomized SipHash

Version 0.3 (2012-07-12)

• ~1900 changes, numerous bugfixes

• New coding conveniences

  • Integer-literal suffix inference
  • Per-item control over warnings, errors
  • #[cfg(windows)] and #[cfg(unix)] attributes
  • Documentation comments
  • More compact closure syntax
  • 'do' expressions for treating higher-order functions as control structures
  • *-patterns (wildcard extended to all constructor fields)

• Semantic cleanup

  • Name resolution pass and exhaustiveness checker rewritten
  • Region pointers and borrow checking supersede alias analysis
  • Init-ness checking is now provided by a region-based liveness pass instead of the typestate pass; same for last-use analysis
  • Extensive work on region pointers

• Experimental new language features

  • Slices and fixed-size, interior-allocated vectors
  • #!-comments for lang versioning, shell execution
  • Destructors and iface implementation for classes; type-parameterized classes and class methods
  • 'const' type kind for types that can be used to implement shared-memory concurrency patterns

• Type reflection

• Removal of various obsolete features

  • Keywords: 'be', 'prove', 'syntax', 'note', 'mutable', 'bind', 'crust', 'native' (now 'extern'), 'cont' (now 'again')

  • Constructs: do-while loops ('do' repurposed), fn binding, resources (replaced by destructors)

• Compiler reorganization

  • Syntax-layer of compiler split into separate crate
  • Clang (from LLVM project) integrated into build
  • Typechecker split into sub-modules

• New library code

  • New time functions
  • Extension methods for many built-in types
  • Arc: atomic-refcount read-only / exclusive-use shared cells
  • Par: parallel map and search routines
  • Extensive work on libuv interface
  • Much vector code moved to libraries
  • Syntax extensions: #line, #col, #file, #mod, #stringify, #include, #include_str, #include_bin

• Tool improvements

  • Cargo automatically resolves dependencies

Version 0.2 (2012-03-29)

• 1500 changes, numerous bugfixes

• New docs and doc tooling

• New port: FreeBSD x86_64

• Compilation model enhancements

  • Generics now specialized, multiply instantiated
  • Functions now inlined across separate crates

• Scheduling, stack and threading fixes

  • Noticeably improved message-passing performance
  • Explicit schedulers
  • Callbacks from C
  • Helgrind clean

• Experimental new language features

  • Operator overloading
  • Region pointers
  • Classes

• Various language extensions

  • C-callback function types: 'crust fn ...'
  • Infinite-loop construct: 'loop { ... }'
  • Shorten 'mutable' to 'mut'
  • Required mutable-local qualifier: 'let mut ...'
  • Basic glob-exporting: 'export foo::*;'
  • Alt now exhaustive, 'alt check' for runtime-checked
  • Block-function form of 'for' loop, with 'break' and 'ret'.

• New library code

  • AST quasi-quote syntax extension
  • Revived libuv interface
  • New modules: core::{future, iter}, std::arena
  • Merged per-platform std::{os*, fs*} to core::{libc, os}
  • Extensive cleanup, regularization in libstd, libcore

Version 0.1 (2012-01-20)

• Most language features work, including:

  • Unique pointers, unique closures, move semantics
  • Interface-constrained generics
  • Static interface dispatch
  • Stack growth
  • Multithread task scheduling
  • Typestate predicates
  • Failure unwinding, destructors
  • Pattern matching and destructuring assignment
  • Lightweight block-lambda syntax
  • Preliminary macro-by-example

• Compiler works with the following configurations:

  • Linux: x86 and x86_64 hosts and targets
  • macOS: x86 and x86_64 hosts and targets
  • Windows: x86 hosts and targets

• Cross compilation / multi-target configuration supported.

• Preliminary API-documentation and package-management tools included.

Known issues:

• Documentation is incomplete.

• Performance is below intended target.

• Standard library APIs are subject to extensive change, reorganization.

• Language-level versioning is not yet operational - future code will break unexpectedly.