Rust 0.8 released

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-September/005804.html

by steveklabnik • 13 years ago

222 96 13 years ago

mail.mozilla.org

mcpherrinm2• 13 years ago

Remember that Rust is still a rapidly changing language, and releases have very little connotation of stability, support, or any other guarantees.

They're released on a schedule, not by features. They're useful to be able to refer to periods of time in Rust's rapidly changing lifetime, but not much beyond that.

mscottmcbee• 13 years ago

So 1.0 will be released at a certain time regardless of features?

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

10 is the number that comes after 9, so I'd expect a 0.10. Rust has SemVer baked into its standard library, and the package manager (hopefully soon) will assume SemVer.

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

Absolutely. Milestones are a better indicator of that: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/milestones

Specifically, maturity #5 - production ready: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues?milestone=16&state=op...

  > The purpose of this milestone is to represent a high degree of confidence the
  > language's suitability for industrial use due to a high level of measured
  > correctness and performance in the tests.
  
  > In other words, for each of the aspects described in the "well covered"
  > milestone, and for each supported target platform, test success and benchmark
  > performance has reached a level deemed suitable for production use in
  > environments with substantial business consequences for major defects or low
  > performance. Where possible, performance benchmarks are linked to equivalent
  > benchmarks in competitive languages, and rust is sufficiently close to
  > equivalent in performance.

marshray5• 13 years ago

I like https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues?milestone=13&page=1&s...

    > maturity #2 - backwards compatible
    > we are comfortable making a long-term support commitment to downstream
    > users (servo in particular) to keep the set of symbols, definitions
    > and passing-tests from contracting

ternaryoperator• 13 years ago

This! I so want to play with Rust. I want to explore it over programs that are several thousand lines long, so I can get a real flavor for it. But the rate of change especially to important elements of the language is still too great. I don't want to rewrite the code to stay abreast of revs.

Not a critique by any means--I admire the language and the work being done. More of a wish that the core language syntax would settle down soon.

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

To be clear, the syntax changes in this release were very minor. It's mostly the standard library and runtime that are changing at this time.

That doesn't mean that your sentiment is wrong; if you don't want to be keeping up with the langauge's changes, certainly don't write projects in Rust. That said, there are more libraries than you'd expect, including a few that are several thousands of lines.

nullc• 13 years ago

Of course, the change also means your play might have an impact still: If you use it and find something about the design stinks, wastes your time, induces errors, etc... while the language is still in flux there exists the possibility of fixing these things.

In this regard it couldn't be a better time to try it out.

mcpherrinm2• 13 years ago

I've been writing Rust code off and on, and even moving some code from back in February to the recent trunk codebase wasn't that painful: Yes, there were some changes I had to make, and the code isn't perfectly idiomatic modern Rust, but it does run.

I wouldn't devote a crucial project, school assignment, or startup to rust. But for some toy side projects, or small programs, it's not so bad right now.

metajack2• 13 years ago

Release notes are here: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-detailed-release-no...

chrismorgan17• 13 years ago

If you were wanting to use Rust but also wanted to use HTTP (client or server), I've got https://github.com/chris-morgan/rust-http which has rapidly become the de facto HTTP library (although it started after Rust 0.7 was released). It's far from complete—but that's an opportunity for you to join in, if you want.

erkose• 13 years ago

"far from complete" and "de facto HTTP library" doesn't say much for rust.

spicyj• 13 years ago

Rust isn't, and doesn't pretend to be, production ready so it's pointless to judge it as if it were.

chrismorgan17• 13 years ago

It's good enough that the Servo team decided to use its client (and now do), but the approach I've taken (implementing the HTTP spec thoroughly, putting Rust's type system to good use) will take quite a long time before it's really polished (e.g. we must implement types for every type of header, rather than just using strings and leaving it to users to interpret them [often incorrectly]). It's still a little experimental, but it's the only really serious HTTP library there is for Rust out there.

Just wait until it's done. It will be a really great HTTP library.

alexatkeplar2• 13 years ago

Looks great - add it to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14154753/how-do-i-make-an... and I'll happily vote up!

chrismorgan17• 13 years ago

Thanks for reminding me: done. I saw that one earlier when I was looking for places to <del>plug</del><ins>advise people about</ins> rust-http, but at that time I only had an HTTP server. Then when I implemented the client I forgot to add an answer there.

continuations• 13 years ago

Is there an actively developed web framework for Rust, kind of like Revel for Go?

I have a toy web project I'm starting. Would love to play with Rust.

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

Not yet. As chrismorgan points out above, the http library is still being developed, once it's more stable, web frameworks can be built on top of that.

zokier2• 13 years ago

Wouldn't web frameworks be using something like fastcgi rather than raw http?

devx• 13 years ago

If they make their next-gen browser using Rust, I hope they make it 64-bit-only, and optimize it as much as possible for x64 and ARMv8. None of that "support back to Windows XP!" stuff. It wouldn't be necessary (will still have Firefox a few years longer for that), and it would just hold them back in terms development time, maintenance, performance and security.

Then it would be not just great PR for their "highly-optimized no legacy cruft 64-bit browser", but would also give people a reason to switch from Firefox to it. It would also give Mozilla an excuse to not make a 64-bit Firefox anymore.

I assume it's going to take them at least 2-3 years to do it (if they ever plan to release it), and by then Microsoft will probably release a 64-bit only Windows 9, iOS will be 64-only, too (probably not relevant to Mozilla, but could be in the future), and at least half of all Android smartphone users will have ARMv8-based devices.

Mozilla should take full advantage of this, and really push for performance (and security), and they should only make it available from Android 5.0 (probably the first 64-bit Android version) and Windows 7 x64. Support for Linux kernel should probably start with no lower than 3.10 LTS (contains all the ARMv8 support).

marshray5• 13 years ago

Note that Windows XP 64 bit was a thing. :-)

Very few of today's apps actually benefit from having more than 3GB of address space. Nothing on my desktop PC is using more than 300MB at the moment. All else being equal, 32 bits will be more efficient, particularly on portable devices which tend to have far less memory bandwidth.

jfb• 13 years ago

All other things are not equal, however.

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

You sound interested in this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

And this: http://people.mozilla.org/~roc/Samsung/MozillaRustAndServo.p...

metajack2• 13 years ago

You make good points, and the Servo team is doing more or less as you described. Our primary target is 64bit and we plan to leave behind lots of legacy stuff.

The extra parallelism we're after also enables new things too. For example, Servo runs cross-origin and sandboxed iframes in parallel.

glesica2• 13 years ago

I've messed around with Rust a little and I love what I see! The documentation is still poor (understandable given how quickly the target is moving) but that seems to be changing. This is a really exciting, multi-paradigm language and I wish Mozilla all the best in developing it further!

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

Ive been making it my mission to improve the docs, especially as the language settles down.

Any suggestions welcome, here or via email.

polyfractal• 13 years ago

I would really love if the reference docs pointed to the underlying code. Many times I'll skim through the reference docs looking for something that I need...then search github for the same section in code so that I can see how it is actually used (or implemented, since the compiler is often the best place to learn Rust itself).

Would be great if the docs just linked straight to the function/crate in github.

saosebastiao2• 13 years ago

1) I think I've had 4 different people try to explain lifetimes to me and I still don't think I understand.

2) The use of pointer dereferencing in closures is still quite confusing to me. For example, from the tutorial:

  let square = |x: int| -> uint { (x * x) as uint };

no pointer dereferencing, yet:

  [1, 2, 3].map(|x| if *x > max { max = *x });

uses pointer dereferencing. I can't figure out any rhyme or reason behind it.

3) How do you create traits that can be automatically derived? How do you implement a default method?

4) How do you create and use macros, and in what situations are they the appropriate solution over other forms? (I'm used to using macros in lispy languages, but using them as pervasively in other languages seems to be a form of code smell).

glesica2• 13 years ago

Your book is definitely an excellent contribution (I bought it as soon as I found out about it). When I first came to the language I was a little surprised that O'Reilly didn't have a book out, but I guess it was too unstable even for them. Having a good reference that covers not only the syntax (which isn't that hard to learn, let's be honest) but the best practices and common patterns in the language is always a real help.

ww5202• 13 years ago

Rust is pretty good as a language but things are still changing a lot, especially on the library side.

I did a project in Rust as a learning exercise. The language is easy to pick and I was able to hit the ground running from the start. The major learning hurdle I think is the memory model, which is different from most languages out there.

Here's my first Rust project after two weeks of on and off hacking. It's a Memcached client library implementing the Memcached protocols in pure Rust. https://github.com/williamw520/rustymem

saosebastiao2• 13 years ago

Anybody know when there will be a regex library?

chrismorgan17• 13 years ago

Some time, some time. It would really be appreciated.

If you want to try working on it yourself, come join the community! You'll get lots of help with it when you need it.

zokier2• 13 years ago

rust has relatively nice FFI, so I suspect using PCRE shouldn't be too difficult.

skorgu• 13 years ago

Or re2 [0]

[0] https://code.google.com/p/re2/

chrismorgan17• 13 years ago

See also https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues/3591, where re2 is graydon's expressed preference. (graydon was the project leader at that point; more recently brson has taken up that mantle.)

bjz_• 13 years ago

Those interested in using Rust for game development can check out our list of resources: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Computer-Graphics-and-G...

If you want to chat feel free to stop by `#rust-gamedev` on irc.mozilla.org. We're very nice!

dbaupp6• 13 years ago

There's also #rust and #servo on the same server. We're very very nice!

calinet6• 13 years ago

I just want to note, if you ever release something (anything, be it a version or a whole startup), copy their first paragraph intro! I didn't know what Rust was, but after just 8 seconds I did. Fantastic and all too rare.

dodyg• 13 years ago

What do people use for editing Rust source code?

steveklabnik14• 13 years ago

We have syntax files for vim, emacs, kate, gedit. https://github.com/mozilla/rust/tree/929b75e220f6fced42dcfe2...

ww5202• 13 years ago

I use Emacs and just build with make in command line. The compile errors are pretty good to figure things out.

portmanteaufu2• 13 years ago

Congrats on all the progress, guys! I'm really looking forward to getting to work with Rust. I have a couple of questions:

Is the new fixed-stack FFI arrangement the end goal, or is it a stepping stone to a different system? It seems as though always using a big, fixed stack would cause performance/memory issues. Could the compiler detect which Rust fn's call extern "C" functions so I don't have to write annotations? Thanks!

kibwen2• 13 years ago

Fixed-stack is not the end goal. The intent is to migrate back towards small, growable stacks.

There were long discussions over how "smart" the extern stack-size strategy should be. The current arrangement is, as ever, a compromise. In practice, most people writing bindings to C from Rust will wrap the C call into a very thin wrapper function whose job is to handle type conversions and managing the necessary `unsafe` bits. The hope is that putting the annotation on these wrapper functions won't be very onerous, with the result that any Rust code that calls the wrapper functions won't ever have to bothered with remembering the annotations.

portmanteaufu2• 13 years ago

Makes sense, thanks! As an outsider it can be tricky to know which things in the release notes are "This feature is ready" vs "This is simply the present state of things."

pjmlp2• 13 years ago

Congratulations!

When will we be able to compile Rust using a standard LLVM instalation, instead of compiling LLVM with it?

My poor netbook takes almost 3 hours to compile it. :(

Rust 0.8 released

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