Announcing Rust 1.39.0

Previously in Rust 1.36.0, we announced that the Future trait is here. Back then, we noted that:

With this stabilization, we hope to give important crates, libraries, and the ecosystem time to prepare for async / .await, which we’ll tell you more about in the future.

A promise made is a promise kept. So in Rust 1.39.0, we are pleased to announce that async / .await is stabilized! Concretely, this means that you can define async functions and blocks and .await them.

An async function, which you can introduce by writing async fn instead of fn, does nothing other than to return a Future when called. This Future is a suspended computation which you can drive to completion by .awaiting it. Besides async fn, async { ... } and async move { ... } blocks, which act like closures, can be used to define “async literals”.

For more on the release of async / .await, read Niko Matsakis’s blog post.

When pattern matching in Rust, a variable, also known as a “binding”, can be bound in the following ways:

• by-reference, either immutably or mutably. This can be achieved explicitly e.g. through ref my_var or ref mut my_var respectively. Most of the time though, the binding mode will be inferred automatically.

• by-value – either by-copy, when the bound variable’s type implements Copy, or otherwise by-move.

Previously, Rust would forbid taking shared references to by-move bindings in the if guards of match expressions. This meant that the following code would be rejected:

fn main() {
    let array: Box<[u8; 4]> = Box::new([1, 2, 3, 4]);

    match array {
        nums
//      ---- `nums` is bound by move.
            if nums.iter().sum::<u8>() == 10
//                 ^------ `.iter()` implicitly takes a reference to `nums`.
        => {
            drop(nums);
//          ----------- `nums` was bound by move and so we have ownership.
        }
        _ => unreachable!(),
    }
}

With Rust 1.39.0, the snippet above is now accepted by the compiler. We hope that this will give a smoother and more consistent experience with match expressions overall.

With Rust 1.39.0, attributes are now allowed on parameters of functions, closures, and function pointers. Whereas before, you might have written:

#[cfg(windows)]
fn len(slice: &[u16]) -> usize {
    slice.len()
}
#[cfg(not(windows))] 
fn len(slice: &[u8]) -> usize {
    slice.len()
}

…you can now, more succinctly, write:

fn len(
    #[cfg(windows)] slice: &[u16], // This parameter is used on Windows.
    #[cfg(not(windows))] slice: &[u8], // Elsewhere, this one is used.
) -> usize {
    slice.len()
}

The attributes you can use in this position include:

1. Conditional compilation: cfg and cfg_attr

2. Controlling lints: allow, warn, deny, and forbid

3. Helper attributes used by procedural macro attributes applied to items.

   Our hope is that this will be used to provide more readable and ergonomic macro-based DSLs throughout the ecosystem.

In the 1.36.0 release, we announced that NLL had come to Rust 2015 after first being released for Rust 2018 in 1.31.

As noted in the 1.36.0 release, the old borrow checker had some bugs which would allow memory unsafety. These bugs were fixed by the NLL borrow checker. As these fixes broke some stable code, we decided to gradually phase in the errors by checking if the old borrow checker would accept the program and the NLL checker would reject it. If so, the errors would instead become warnings.

With Rust 1.39.0, these warnings are now errors in Rust 2018. In the next release, Rust 1.40.0, this will also apply to Rust 2015, which will finally allow us to remove the old borrow checker, and keep the compiler clean.

If you are affected, or want to hear more, read Niko Matsakis’s blog post.

With Rust 1.39.0, the following functions became const fn:

• Vec::new, String::new, and LinkedList::new
• str::len, [T]::len, and str::as_bytes
• abs, wrapping_abs, and overflowing_abs

In Rust 1.39.0 the following functions were stabilized:

• Pin::into_inner
• Instant::checked_duration_since and Instant::saturating_duration_since