rust-lang/rust 0.7

Rust 0.7

on GitHub

~2000 changes, numerous bugfixes

Language

• impls no longer accept a visibility qualifier. Put them on methods instead.
• The borrow checker has been rewritten with flow-sensitivity, fixing many bugs and inconveniences.
• The self parameter no longer implicitly means &'self self, and can be explicitly marked with a lifetime.
• Overloadable compound operators (+=, etc.) have been temporarily removed due to bugs.
• The for loop protocol now requires for-iterators to return bool so they compose better.
• The Durable trait is replaced with the 'static bounds.
• Trait default methods work more often.
• Structs with the #[packed] attribute have byte alignment and no padding between fields.
• Type parameters bound by Copy must now be copied explicitly with the copy keyword.
• It is now illegal to move out of a dereferenced unsafe pointer.
• Option<~T> is now represented as a nullable pointer.
• @mut does dynamic borrow checks correctly.
• The main function is only detected at the topmost level of the crate. The #[main] attribute is still valid anywhere.
• Struct fields may no longer be mutable. Use inherited mutability.
• The #[no_send] attribute makes a type that would otherwise be Send, not.
• The #[no_freeze] attribute makes a type that would otherwise be Freeze, not.
• Unbounded recursion will abort the process after reaching the limit specified by the RUST_MAX_STACK environment variable (default: 1GB).
• The vecs_implicitly_copyable lint mode has been removed. Vectors are never implicitly copyable.
• #[static_assert] makes compile-time assertions about static bools.
• At long last, 'argument modes' no longer exist.
• The rarely used use mod statement no longer exists.

Syntax extensions

• fail! and assert! accept ~str, &'static str or fmt!-style argument list.
• Encodable, Decodable, Ord, TotalOrd, TotalEq, DeepClone, Rand, Zero and ToStr can all be automatically derived with #[deriving(...)].
• The bytes! macro returns a vector of bytes for string, u8, char, and unsuffixed integer literals.

Libraries

• The core crate was renamed to std.
• The std crate was renamed to extra.
• More and improved documentation.
• std: iterator module for external iterator objects.
• Many old-style (internal, higher-order function) iterators replaced by implementations of Iterator.
• std: Many old internal vector and string iterators, incl. any, all. removed.
• std: The finalize method of Drop renamed to drop.
• std: The drop method now takes &mut self instead of &self.
• std: The prelude no longer re-exports any modules, only types and traits.
• std: Prelude additions: print, println, FromStr, ApproxEq, Equiv, Iterator, IteratorUtil, many numeric traits, many tuple traits.
• std: New numeric traits: Fractional, Real, RealExt, Integer, Ratio, Algebraic, Trigonometric, Exponential, Primitive.
• std: Tuple traits and accessors defined for up to 12-tuples, e.g. (0, 1, 2).n2() or (0, 1, 2).n2_ref().
• std: Many types implement Clone.
• std: path type renamed to Path.
• std: mut module and Mut type removed.
• std: Many standalone functions removed in favor of methods and iterators in vec, str. In the future methods will also work as functions.
• std: reinterpret_cast removed. Use transmute.
• std: ascii string handling in std::ascii.
• std: Rand is implemented for ~/@.
• std: run module for spawning processes overhauled.
• std: Various atomic types added to unstable::atomic.
• std: Various types implement Zero.
• std: LinearMap and LinearSet renamed to HashMap and HashSet.
• std: Borrowed pointer functions moved from ptr to borrow.
• std: Added os::mkdir_recursive.
• std: Added os::glob function performs filesystems globs.
• std: FuzzyEq renamed to ApproxEq.
• std: Map now defines pop and swap methods.
• std: Cell constructors converted to static methods.
• extra: rc module adds the reference counted pointers, Rc and RcMut.
• extra: flate module moved from std to extra.
• extra: fileinput module for iterating over a series of files.
• extra: Complex number type and complex module.
• extra: Rational number type and rational module.
• extra: BigInt, BigUint implement numeric and comparison traits.
• extra: term uses terminfo now, is more correct.
• extra: arc functions converted to methods.
• extra: Implementation of fixed output size variations of SHA-2.

Tooling

• unused_variables lint mode for unused variables (default: warn).
• unused_unsafe lint mode for detecting unnecessary unsafe blocks (default: warn).
• unused_mut lint mode for identifying unused mut qualifiers (default: warn).
• dead_assignment lint mode for unread variables (default: warn).
• unnecessary_allocation lint mode detects some heap allocations that are immediately borrowed so could be written without allocating (default: warn).
• missing_doc lint mode (default: allow).
• unreachable_code lint mode (default: warn).
• The rusti command has been rewritten and a number of bugs addressed.
• rustc outputs in color on more terminals.
• rustc accepts a --link-args flag to pass arguments to the linker.
• rustc accepts a -Z print-link-args flag for debugging linkage.
• Compiling with -g will make the binary record information about dynamic borrowcheck failures for debugging.
• rustdoc has a nicer stylesheet.
• Various improvements to rustdoc.
• Improvements to rustpkg (see the detailed release notes).