Title: This Week in Rust 40 Date: 2014-03-11 23:45 Category: This Week in Rust Hello and welcome to another issue of *This Week in Rust*! [Rust](http://rust-lang.org) is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safe, concurrent, and fast. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? [Send me an email!](mailto:corey@octayn.net?subject=This%20Week%20in%20Rust%20Suggestion) Want to get involved? [We love contributions](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Note-guide-for-new-contributors). This week was the Winter Workweek. # What's cooking on master? 66 pull requests were merged this week. ## Breaking Changes - `Any` [has been cleaned up](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12667), and in particular the `as_void_ptr` and `as_mut_void_ptr` methods are gone. - Patterns are [no longer allowed in extern function declarations](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12715). Previously, they either silently passed or ICEd. - Comparison traits [have been reworked](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12520). - DeepClone [has been removed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12706). - Compound assignment (eg, `+=`) [is no longer allowed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12733) on potentially uninitialized variables. - `std::rand` [has been moved into a `librand`](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12650). - debuginfo flags [have changed slightly](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12714), and more limited debuginfo is supported again (only line number information). ## Other Changes - Dereferencing [is now overloadable](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12491). This is another part of the smart pointer changes. Code like `let x = *Rc::new(5);` is now valid. There is a follow-up pull request that will automatically dereference smart pointers where appropriate, to avoid expressions like `foo.borrow().get().borrow_mut().get()`. - Hexadecimal floating point literals [are now available](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12652) through a syntax extension. - Support for creating binary installer tarballs [has landed](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12793). - Linker arguments [are no longer deduplicated](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12688). - Weak linkage etc [is now possible](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12556) via a `linkage` attribute. ## New Contributors - Dmitry Promsky - Mike Boutin - Robert Gawdzik # Weekly Meeting There was no weekly meeting due to the workweek. There are [notes and minutes](https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Meeting-workweek-2014-03-03), however, and there will be many [RFCs](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs) from it. # Announcements, etc - [Leveraging tuples to make a statically-typed, concatenative EDSL](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/20143y/leveraging_tuples_to_make_a_statically_typed/) - [Subtyping and coercion in Rust](http://featherweightmusings.blogspot.com/2014/03/subtyping-and-coercion-in-rust.html) - [Rust support for the Atom editor](http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ztahv/rust_language_support_in_atom/)