Rust 0.3

• ~1900 changes, numerous bugfixes

• New coding conveniences

  • Integer-literal suffix inference
  • Per-item control over warnings, errors
  • #[cfg(windows)] and #[cfg(unix)] attributes
  • Documentation comments
  • More compact closure syntax
  • 'do' expressions for treating higher-order functions as control structures
  • *-patterns (wildcard extended to all constructor fields)

• Semantic cleanup

  • Name resolution pass and exhaustiveness checker rewritten
  • Region pointers and borrow checking supersede alias analysis
  • Init-ness checking is now provided by a region-based liveness pass instead of the typestate pass; same for last-use analysis
  • Extensive work on region pointers

• Experimental new language features

  • Slices and fixed-size, interior-allocated vectors
  • #!-comments for lang versioning, shell execution
  • Destructors and iface implementation for classes; type-parameterized classes and class methods
  • 'const' type kind for types that can be used to implement shared-memory concurrency patterns

• Type reflection

• Removal of various obsolete features

  • Keywords: 'be', 'prove', 'syntax', 'note', 'mutable', 'bind', 'crust', 'native' (now 'extern'), 'cont' (now 'again')

  • Constructs: do-while loops ('do' repurposed), fn binding, resources (replaced by destructors)

• Compiler reorganization

  • Syntax-layer of compiler split into separate crate
  • Clang (from LLVM project) integrated into build
  • Typechecker split into sub-modules

• New library code

  • New time functions
  • Extension methods for many built-in types
  • Arc: atomic-refcount read-only / exclusive-use shared cells
  • Par: parallel map and search routines
  • Extensive work on libuv interface
  • Much vector code moved to libraries
  • Syntax extensions: #line, #col, #file, #mod, #stringify, #include, #include_str, #include_bin

• Tool improvements

  • Cargo automatically resolves dependencies