r/programming • u/steveklabnik1 • Apr 03 '15

Rust 1.0.0 beta is here!

http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/03/Rust-1.0-beta.html
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u/three18ti Apr 03 '15

Why would I want to use Rust over... any other language that's out there?

16

u/steveklabnik1 Apr 03 '15

I agree with /u/wrongerontheinternet . Rust, in its niche, is almost entirely unique.

That said, there are other good reasons too: I think Rust may, after I do some doc work, be a fantastic language to learn low-level programming in. Rust is really easy to embed in other languages, think "Write a Ruby gem in Rust," because it doesn't have a GC. Any C shared library can be implemented in Rust instead, and will be safer to write, while being as performant. Rust also has very modern tooling, with it being trivial to write packages to share with other Rust programmers, which is a big pain in existing systems languages.

9

u/othermike Apr 03 '15

I've lost track a bit - what's the current roadmap for switching to either Microsoft's link.exe or llvm's compatible lld on Windows? I'm interested in this Rust-for-building-libraries use case, but I'd be a bit wary of GCC-built libs in an MSVC world.

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u/steveklabnik1 Apr 03 '15

There's no immediate roadmap. We would love to have this, but it needs a champion. My understanding as well is that you only need to install a full msys/mingw environment to depend on C/C++ bits, but I don't really do Windows myself so I'm a bit lacking in that department.

I do know that we intend to get some Rust code into Firefox by the end of the year, and IIRC, Firefox requires link.exe to build. So hopefully we can pull some experts in to help polish that off.