As usual, a thread to highlight some of the new features:
1/11
1. panic!() and assert!() can now be used in const fns.
Any formatting other than panic!("..") and panic!("{}", some_str) is not accepted though, because formatting is not const (yet!).
2/11
2. Many functions in the standard library have been marked as #[must_use], to warn you when just calling the function without using its result is most likely a mistake.
Vec, String, VecDeque, HashMap and HashSet now have a .try_reserve() method. This method is similar to .reserve(), except it doesn't panic/abort when it was unable to allocate memory.
7/11
7. Vec::leak no longer reallocates.
Vec::leak used to shrink the capacity before leaking the data, which might involve a reallocation. The behaviour is now changed to always leak the current allocation, without shrinking/reallocating first.
8/11
8. std::hint::unreachable_unchecked is now const.
In *const* context, it'll result in a compiler error when reached, not in undefined behaviour like it would at runtime.
🆕🦀 Just an hour ago, #rustlang 1.66.0 was released!
As usual, here's a thread with some of the highlights. 🧵
1/12
Rust 1.66 comes with std::hint::black_box(), a function that does nothing. However, the compiler tries its very best to pretend it doesn't know what it does.
It is useful in benchmarks, to prevent the compiler from optimizing your entire benchmark away.
2/12
The Option type got a new method: Option::unzip(). It's basically the opposite of Option::zip(): it splits an Option of a pair into a pair of Options.
Rust now has a new async-related trait: IntoFuture.
The .await syntax be used on anything that implements IntoFuture. (Similar to how, with a for loop, you can iterate over anything that implements IntoIterator.)
This allows types to provide easier async interfaces.
2/15
Today's Rust release also comes with two more async-related tools:
The std::future::poll_fn function allows you to easily create a future from a closure (like iter::from_fn for iterators).
The std::task::ready!() macro extracts a Poll::Ready, or returns early on Pending.
Cargo now has 'cargo add' built-in: a (sub)command to add a crate to your Cargo.toml. It automatically looks up the latest version, and shows you the available features of the crate.
See `cargo add --help` for more details.
2/9
On Linux and several BSDs, std::sync's Mutex, RwLock, and Condvar now no longer do any allocations. They used to be (heap-allocated) wrappers around pthread lock types, but have been replaced by a minimal, more efficient, futex-based implementations.
🦀 As of Rust 1.62 (going into beta this week), std::sync::Mutex, RwLock, and Condvar no longer do any allocations on Linux. 🎉
Benchmarking locks is extremely tricky, as their performance depends heavily on the exact use case, but there are very noticable differences:
std's Mutex basically used to contain a Pin<Box<pthread_mutex_t>>, where the pinned Box was only necessary because pthread_mutex_t is not guaranteed movable. The new Mutex no longer uses pthread, and instead directly uses the futex syscall, making it smaller and more efficient.
Also, the new RwLock on Linux prefers writers, which prevents writer starvation. pthread_rwlock_t prefers readers by default, to allow recursive read locking. Rust's RwLock does not make recursion guarantees, and on several platforms (including Windows) already preferred writers.