rust-lang/rust 0.3

Rust 0.3

on GitHub

~1900 changes, numerous bugfixes

New coding conveniences

• Integer-literal suffix inference
• Per-item control over warnings, errors
• #[cfg(windows)] and #[cfg(unix)] attributes
• Documentation comments
• More compact closure syntax
• 'do' expressions for treating higher-order functions as control structures
• *-patterns (wildcard extended to all constructor fields)

Semantic cleanup

• Name resolution pass and exhaustiveness checker rewritten
• Region pointers and borrow checking supersede alias analysis
• Init-ness checking is now provided by a region-based liveness pass instead of the typestate pass; same for last-use analysis
• Extensive work on region pointers

Experimental new language features

• Slices and fixed-size, interior-allocated vectors
• #!-comments for lang versioning, shell execution
• Destructors and iface implementation for classes; type-parameterized classes and class methods
• 'const' type kind for types that can be used to implement shared-memory concurrency patterns

Type reflection

Removal of various obsolete features

• Keywords: 'be', 'prove', 'syntax', 'note', 'mutable', 'bind', 'crust', 'native' (now 'extern'), 'cont' (now 'again')

• Constructs: do-while loops ('do' repurposed), fn binding, resources (replaced by destructors)

Compiler reorganization

• Syntax-layer of compiler split into separate crate
• Clang (from LLVM project) integrated into build
• Typechecker split into sub-modules

New library code

• New time functions
• Extension methods for many built-in types
• Arc: atomic-refcount read-only / exclusive-use shared cells
• Par: parallel map and search routines
• Extensive work on libuv interface
• Much vector code moved to libraries
• Syntax extensions: #line, #col, #file, #mod, #stringify, #include, #include_str, #include_bin

Tool improvements

• Cargo automatically resolves dependencies