Welcome to another issue of *This Week in Rust*, a weekly newsletter summarizing Rust's progress and community activity. As always, if you have something you'd like to be featured, just [send me an email](mailto:[email protected]?subject=This Week in Rust Suggestion).
Last week was very slow, but this week more than makes up for it I think! Static linking landed, and there's been some nice cleanup of error messages and various APIs. # What's cooking on master? 59 PRs were merged this week. ## Breaking Changes - Names of methods creating iterators have [changed drastically](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10622) to remove the `_iter` suffix. This reflects that iterators are a primary focus of APIs. The PR description has all of the changes summarized. - We now have [static linking support](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10528)! It does, however, involve some changes with how the `link` attribute works. The error messages should guide you to the fixes. - In preparation for the placement new changes, the `Path` constructor has been [renamed from `new` to `init`](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10697),. - Some overly-permissive borrow checking for `&mut &mut` [has been fixed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10519). This is fairly obscure, most code shouldn't have hit it. - The parser is [more strict](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10642) about what it accepts as a doc comment. Now, only `///` and `/**` are counted as introducing doc comments (previously, `////` and `/***` would also introduce a doc comment). - `std::{uint, int}::{min, max}` [have been removed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10719). They were identical to the functions in `std::cmp`, so use those instead. - `extra::json` [has been rid of @ boxes](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10727), and now uses idiomatic constructor names. - The `type_id` intrinsic [now uses a language item as its return value](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10722). - Some [cleanup](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10662) has been done to `std::rt::thread`, which is an interface to native threads (rather than tasks). - `do` blocks are [no longer allowed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10581) in non-`proc` contexts. This means that `do` can not be used with a function whose last argument is not a `proc`. A fairly large [thread on the mailing list](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-November/006999.html) is ongoing about this change. - `LittleLock` now [uses RAII](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10660). - C-like enums are [now represented as an integer](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10652) rather than a struct, at the LLVM level. This affects ABI. - Linked failure [has been removed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10603) from the runtime. - `extra::term` [no longer uses `@mut Writer`](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10637), instead taking the writer to use by value. ## Other changes - `RefCell<T>`, previously known as `Mut<T>`, [has finally landed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10514), for all your dynamic borrow checking needs. - A lint for unknown attributes [has finally been added](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10316). The compiler will now warn when it sees an attribute it doesn't recognize. - A lock-free [Chase-Lev deque](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.170.1097&rep=rep1&type=pdf) has [been added to the runtime](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10678). - The shootout-spectralnorm benchmark [has been resurrected](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10704). - Unknown feature gates [are now linted](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10680), rather than being a hard failure. - The AST is [now frozen](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10693)! - `GenericPort` [now has an iterator](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10688) over the messages it receives. - `NodeId`, `CrateNum`, `Name`, and `Mrk` (types in libsyntax) [have been shrunk to 32 bits](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10670). - The restriction on macros expanding to a single item [has been lifted](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10649). This obviates the need for macros hackily expanding to a module containing the desired items. Do note that this only works when the macro is in "item position", or where an item is expected. There is an [issue](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/10681) open for lifting this restriction. - A `thread_local` attribute [has been added](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10312), which exposes a platform's native TLS, a la C11/C++11 `thread_local`. - Cross compilation to win64 (via mingw-w64) [is now supported](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10578). There were also a [bunch of fixes](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10631) on real win64. - The parser gives a [better error message](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10641) when it encounters an unclosed delimiter it didn't expect. - There is a [better error message](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10475) when a module name is used as a type (the motivating example being `impl SomeTrait for some_module`). - JSON decoding [now gives better errors](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10625). - Linker optimizations are [now used](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10620) on Linux. ## New contributors Our first-time contributors this week are: - Andreas Ots - Eric Biggers - Jannis Harder - Kiet Tran # Weekly Meeting The [weekly meeting](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Meeting-weekly-2013-11-26) discussed bootstrap times, the `thread_local` PR, mutexes, and the GC. In particular, it was decided that we should have nightlies. # This Week in Servo Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language. This was a short week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday, but there were still 17 landed PRs this week. ## Notable additions - Hyunjune Kim and Sammy Kim landed some border style extensions in [#1276](http://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1322). - Youngmin Yoo, Seonghyun Kim, and Jaemin Moon landed overflow:hidden in [#1298](http://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1298). - Isabelle Carter landed changing the unrendered portion of content to use the doc's background color in [#1210](http://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1210). - Patrick Walton has been experimenting with some very promising parallel layout work, which he described in a [message](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/1nKmBvFewIs) to the mailing list. ## Meetings This week's [meeting](https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Meeting-2013-11-25) covered the poor situation with Nvidia support on Linux, fleshed out the string interning plan during CSS selector parsing/matching, and went into some Servo and Rust-related build issues. # Announcements etc Do note that all the links are pulled directly from the [subreddit](https://reddit.com/r/rust). - [Matrix Multiply Performance in Rust](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1rf8rz/matrix_multiply_performance_in_rust/) - [nrays](https://github.com/sebcrozet/nrays) - a 3d/4d raytracer - [SprocketNES: Practical Systems Programming in Rust](https://air.mozilla.org/sprocketnes-practical-systems-programming-in-rust/). Contrary to the title, this is actually a recording of the presentations at the Bay Area meetup. - [uutils](https://github.com/uutils/coreutils) - an attempt at writing universal (as in cross-platform) CLI utils in Rust - [lbac](https://github.com/cmr/lets-build-a-compiler) - a Rust port of Jack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
