Closing out an incredible week in Rust
This week has been so amazing that I just had to write about it. Here’s a quick list of some of what went down in one week:
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Breakthrough #1: @withoutboats and @eddyb tag-teamed to develop a safe, library-based foundation for borrowing in async blocks. It’s suddenly seeming plausible to ship async/await notation with borrowing as part of Rust Epoch 2018.
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Breakthrough #2: @nikomatsakis had a eureka moment and figured out a path to make specialization sound, while still supporting its most important use cases (blog post forthcoming!). Again, this suddenly puts specialization on the map for Rust Epoch 2018. Update: the post is here!
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Breakthrough #3: @seanmonstar came up with a brilliant way to make “context arguments” more ergonomic, which lets us make a long-desired change to the futures crate without regressing ergonomics.
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Tokio reform: @carllerche shipped the newly reformed Tokio crate, with a plan for intercepting ongoing work with futures and laying a more stable foundation for async I/O in 2018.
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Futures 0.2: @cramertj, @alexcrichton and I have completed and merged an RFC for futures 0.2, and the 0.2 branch made a ton of progress.
- Domain working groups: we now have an all-star lineup for leading the 2018 Domain Working Groups:
- Networking services: @withoutboats and @cramertj
- WebAssembly: @fitzgen
- CLI apps: @killercup
- Embedded: @japaric
- Libs Team restructuring: we finalized a revamp of the Libs Team, which will break out:
- a subgroup to manage
stdled by @alexcrichton, - a subgroup working on discoverability led by myself, and
- a subgroup supporting ecosystem work led by @kodraus
- a subgroup to manage
- A vision for portability in Rust: I finally wrote up the vision we’ve been working toward for a uniform way of handling portability concerns in Rust.
These are just the items that loomed large for me personally; one of the great things about how Rust has grown last year is that it has taken on an increasing set of leaders and teams doing great work independently. It’s now simply impossible to drink from the full firehose. But even a sip from the firehose, like the list above, can blow you away.