Graydon’s work on Mozilla

Another six months and we have our first release. Rust is now at a point where we’d like to invite people to write code in it. It’s not set in stone — things will change, code will break — but we’re comfortable expanding the set of users a little beyond the set of compiler hackers. You can write interesting programs and libraries in it now; we’d like to see adventurous people try to do so, and see how it goes.

Since my last post, Rust gained some new features:

• Expanded documentation, including a tutorial and library API reference.
• Working stack growth, stack unwinding and destructors.
• Improved safe reference analysis and argument-passing logic.
• Extension of the closure system to handle capture clauses and uniqueness.
• Maturation of the system of unique pointers and move semantics, to the point where spawning unique closures directly as subtasks works reliably.
• An x86-64 port in addition to the x86 port, including multi-target compilation.
• New tools, rustdoc and cargo, to document and manage rust packages.
• A system of dynamic dispatch, constrained generics and static overloading using decoupled interfaces and implementations, similar to Haskell typeclasses.

Release downloads are available at the Rust website.