It’s been three months since version one of the Mozilla-backed programming language Rust was released. Rust 1.0 focused on stability, community and clarity. But looking ahead, the programming language team plans to tackle infrastructure, use cases and improving key features over the next year.
“Our basic stability promise for Rust is that upgrades between versions are ‘hassle-free,’ ” wrote Rust team members Nicholas Matsakis and Aaron Turon in a blog post. “To deliver on this promise, we need to detect compiler bugs that cause code to stop working.”
Over the next year, the team will work on creating a tool that lets library authors see how changes affect their code, introducing a new incremental compilation model, and extending support for IDEs and other tools.
(Related: Rust hits version 1.0)
To close the gaps in some of Rust’s key features, the team has proposed specialization to enable multiple overlapping trait implementations, and it is planning to propose a new plug-in to provide more stability and support.
In addition, the team will focus on bringing Rust to new environments by improving cross-compiling with Rust, as well as extending the compiler with “trace hooks” capabilities to make it easier to embed Rust.
“Rust is exciting because it is empowering: You can hack without fear,” wrote Matsakis and Turon. “And you can do so in contexts you might not have before, dropping down from languages like Ruby or Python, making your first foray into systems programming.”
