Rust, a Mozilla-backed programming language compiler and assorted tools, has reached version 0.9. The new release comes with a variety of improvements as it moves its way toward the 1.0 milestone.

Rust is a “safe, concurrent and practical language” that resembles the C language family, but notably differs in syntactic and semantic details, according to its website.

Rust 0.9 features include:
• Support for static linking and LTO
• Support for both 1:1 and M:N threading models
• A revision of the I/O infrastructure
• An improved compiler performance
• A new runtime written entirely in Rust
• A new facility for enabling experimental features

Complete details can be found in the release notes or in the Rust language tutorial.

Currently there are two known uses of Rust in production. OpenDNS is using it for real-time data processing, and Tilde is using it in Skylight, according to Rust’s blog.

The next version of Rust, 0.10, will introduce dynamically sized types and possibly a garbage collector.

The release of Rust 1.0 is estimated before the end of 2014.