
Announcing Rust 1.3 - steveklabnik
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/09/17/Rust-1.3.html
======
kibwen
Lots of great little things in this release (my favorite is probably
[https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/26926](https://github.com/rust-
lang/rust/pull/26926), hooray for removing external dependencies (come oooooon
LLD...)), but what I'm really excited about is the upcoming 1.4 release.

For the past few cycles we've been speaking to production users of Rust and
determining what features were keeping them on nightly builds rather than
stable releases, and have been gradually stabilizing those APIs and features.
Rust 1.4 (due October 29) will be the first release with the aforementioned
stable items. So if your company is currently using Rust in production and
you've been tracking the nightly builds, instead of updating to 1.5-nightly
today I heartily encourage you to upgrade to 1.4-beta instead and help us test
the next release. If you have any trouble, let us know at rust-
community@googlegroups.com (or at the email address in my HN profile) and
we'll look into getting what you need stabilized in time for Rust 1.5. :)

~~~
buster
Is there a list of features in 1.4?

~~~
kibwen
No nicely-compiled list that I know of. Though now that 1.4 is in beta we
won't be adding any features to it (unless there's something unspeakably
urgent, that is), so conceivably we could come up with a changelog right this
moment. For the moment you may be best served by perusing the installments of
This Week In Rust ([http://this-week-in-rust.org/](http://this-week-in-
rust.org/)) for the past six weeks.

------
kozukumi
How is rust on Windows these days? The last time I looked at it (pre-1.0) I
believe it still needed external libraries from MinGW or something? I could be
totally wrong, I don't keep tabs on the progress other than when it is posted
about here.

~~~
valarauca1
I've written a few _IT Scripts_ in Rust to do simple things like modify DNS
files, set file permissions, back up dir's.

The only _change_ between the Windows/Linux was modifying the paths from " / "
to " \\\ ". I could just git clone, and pass all tests out of the box.

This is also my experience moving a code base from Linux x86_64 to ARMv7.

None of these we're dipping heavily into unsafe code, so ymmv.

~~~
blaenk
You shouldn't have to change the path separators; Windows supports '/' as
well, if you're working with paths. If there's something else you're doing,
you might benefit from something like [http://doc.rust-
lang.org/std/path/constant.MAIN_SEPARATOR.ht...](http://doc.rust-
lang.org/std/path/constant.MAIN_SEPARATOR.html)

------
arthursilva
Welcome improvements! I guess I'll be able to compile all my code on stable
1.4 judging by [https://github.com/rust-
lang/rust/pull/28339](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/28339).

------
mtgx
I almost thought the Windows XP support was meant as a joke. Seriously, why
invest any effort for that? Isn't it in like its second year of not being
supported by Microsoft anymore? Is a large portion of your contributors from
China?

~~~
steveklabnik
Quite a large number of users on XP, yes. As has been said many times, if we
judge by usage, Firefox would drop desktop Linux support before dropping
Windows XP support. And we all want Rust code to make Firefox better, don't
we?

(Not that this decision was just because of Firefox, mind you. Users ask for
it.)

    
    
        >  Is a large portion of your contributors from China?
    

I don't know about a 'large portion' exactly, but yes, there is a lot of
attention, interest, usage, and contributors from China.

~~~
kibwen
Interestingly, a lot of emerging languages are seeing huge interest from
China, though we often don't realize it over in the West. Go is another
example of a language with an enormous Chinese backing.

~~~
phkahler
>> Go is another example of a language with an enormous Chinese backing.

Is that simply because of the larger population, or is it actually more
popular among developers in percentages? If the later, any idea why?

~~~
kibwen
All of my sources are secondary, so I can't answer for certain. That said, we
ought to expect any emerging market with a large population and a burgeoning
tech industry to be represented to some degree (India being another example).

------
vvanders
Nice to see them plugging along.

I don't know where it is on the stabilization timeline but it would be nice to
see the ability to move a heap value out of a Box<T> without using the stable
APIs.

I've a few use cases where another languages is calling Rust and I want to
return an allocated struct over FFI but std::mem::transmute(Box<T>) has a size
mismatch and std::boxed::from_raw/into_raw are unstable.

~~~
kzrdude
Take a short snippet of your code pastebin it, bring your question to #rust
and we'll help you quickly.

FYI, Box::into_raw will be stable in Rust 1.4, next release.

~~~
vvanders
Nice! That's what I was wondering :)

------
eximius
Rustonomicon - great!

