Title: This Week in Rust 27 Date: 2013-12-16 16:14 Category: This Week in Rust Hello and welcome to another issue of *This Week in Rust*! It's late this week because bors was having some issues which bounced every pull request, and it's no fun writing about nothing. # What's cooking on master? 61 PRs were merged this week. ## Breaking Changes - The first part of the `box` changes [has landed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10929). `box` is a keyword, and in an expression is now synonymous with `~` (ie, it allocates an owned box). - `std::vec::raw` [has seen some cleanup](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10984). - Link meta attributes [have been replaced](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10593) with a `pkgid`. rustdoc [also now requires](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10948) a `pkgid` attribute, rather than the deprecated link meta. - Some fairly obscure import syntax [has been changed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10808). `use {foo, bar}` is now permitted, and the old `use foo, bar` is not. - `Cell` [has been removed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10791). `RefCell` supersedes it. - Attempting to implement private traits [no longer works](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10862). - The coherence `-Z` flag [has been removed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10909). - The `self` lifetime [is now illegal](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10897), like the rest of the keywords. Now, lifetime parameters are truly only identifiers. ## Other changes - A dead code warning [has been implemented](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10477). This is pretty awesome and will do things like warn for test functions that are accidentally never marked `#[test]` and so are never called. Some bugs in it were [also](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10870) [fixed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10994). - The benchmark runner [now handles](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10952) slow benchmarks. Previously, it wouldn't run a benchmark that took more than 1ms. Now, it will! - The `shootout-fasta` benchmark [has been rewritten](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10933). It's about 10x faster, and looks nicer. - Stepping through / breaking on function calls [no longer goes through the function prelude](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10966). - The vector `move_iter` [has been made faster](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10995). - A single [`#[inline]`](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10918) has made `vec::from_elem` 20x faster - `Buffer` [now has an iterator over its lines](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10856). The gotcha is that the newlines are included in the yielded strings. - Struct pattern shorthand [has been improved](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10833) by allowing ref/mut, like `let Foo { mut x, .. } = some_foo`, rather than the previous `let Foo { x: mut x, .. } = some_foo`. - LTO (link time optimization) [has been implemented](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10812). Rejoice. - All landing pads (and thus unwinding!) [can now be omitted](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10916) when doing LTO. - `std::io::util` [has been added](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10895) with: - `LimitReader` that will only read `n` bytes from another reader - `NullWriter` that ignores everything written to it - `NullReader` that is always EOF - `ZeroReader` which returns all zeroes, - `MultiWriter` which will replicate a written buffer to many writers - `ChainedReader` which reads readers in order to completion - `TeeReader` which will write to a Writer while reading - a `copy` function which copies the full contents of a reader into a writer. - Windows application manifests [are now embedded](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10878), so we don't get special cased. - A `--dep-info` flag [has been added](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10698) which is like `-MMD` to C compilers. - `&mut` underneath `&` can [now be frozen](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10787). - `PortReader` and `ChanWriter` [have been implemented](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10823). - Some more random distributions [have been implemented](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10859). - We [now use](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/10874) LLVM's integrated assembler on Windows. ## New contributors - Cadence Marseille - Edward Z. Yang - Erik Price - Fabrice Desré - Jan Niklas Hasse - Richard Diamond # Meeting The [weekly meeting](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Meeting-weekly-2013-12-10) discussed `enum mod`, using types to drive inference (rather than attributes like `#[no_send]` etc), a formal grammar, unwinding, and some various PRs (all mentioned above). # This Week in Servo Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language. We landed 29 PRs this week. ## Notable additions - Patrick Walton landed a number of changes to layout to avoid going back to the DOM for properties to make layout's access to the DOM more opaque. He also cleaned up a significant number of regressions and added a huge number of ref tests. - Keegan McAllister made content tests work in headless mode in [#1382](https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1382). - Daniel Glazman added namespace info to elements in [#1358](https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1358). - Daniel Hedlund added support for leading font metrics on Linux [#1352](https://github.com/mozilla/servo/pull/1352). ## Meetings This week's [meeting](https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Meeting-2013-12-09) discussed an upcoming Servo workweek in SF on January 20th. We also discussed the Rust version update and some general team frustration at a large number of regressions lately, primarily caused by the need to disable some of our automated testing due to instability (particularly at shutdown). This week of work saw many of those issues fixed. # Announcements, etc - [FAQ Cheatsheet](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-FAQ-Cheatsheet) - A cookbook-style cheatsheet of how to do simple things, based on IRC FAQs. - [Building Rust Code - Current Issues](http://metajack.im/2013/12/11/building-rust-code--current-issues/) - [Building Rust Code - Using Make](http://metajack.im/2013/12/12/building-rust-code--using-make/) - [A Rust port of kissdb](https://github.com/pirapira/kissdb-rust) - [Reddit discussion](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1syapv/implement_the_new_box_syntax_for_unique_pointers/) of the `box` change.