Thursday, June 4, 2020

Five Years of Rust

Rust Core Team (tweet, Hacker News):

Rust has changed a lot these past five years, so we wanted to reflect back on all of our contributors’ work since the stabilization of the language.

[…]

One thing that we haven’t mentioned much is how much Rust’s error messages and diagnostics have improved since 1.0. Looking at older error messages now feels like looking at a different language.

That’s five years since Rust 1.0. It was announced ten years ago, and work started before that. (Swift was announced six years ago and labeled 1.0 a few months later.)

Previously:

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

I wonder if Apple will start replacing some C stuff in Core Foundation (and maybe even XNU?) with Rust. Swift seems more likely, but unless it gains some of the memory/lifetime features of Rust, seems like a poorer fit.

@Sören It seems like the plan is to add those features to Swift (making them optional).

@Soren The plan to incorporate linear typing into Swift is described here: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/OwnershipManifesto.md

It's slightly messy in that there will be old code that doesn't use ownership and new code that does. Chris Lattner, in his first interview for ATP, suggested that Swift might want to borrow Perl's `strict` mode to force individual modules to adhere to certain standards.

Thanks! But I can't decide if this is a case of competition being good™, or NIH.

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