Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

The 1.1 release came out a day earlier than I expected, I suppose we're releasing on Thursdays now. :P Note that 1.1 is a relatively small release, since, due to launching the train release model, it was in development for just three weeks prior to 1.0 (rather than the usual six weeks that all subsequent releases will have spent in development), and during that time we were all understandably in a tizzy preparing for a post-stability world. :)

However, despite that short and distracted development window, we still managed to squeeze out compiler performance improvements that should result in 30% faster compiles for crates in the wild. You can expect even more progress on the compilation speed front for 1.2, due to be released August 6, along with a slew of stabilized and much-demanded stdlib APIs.

Let me also mention that tickets have just gone on sale for the first official Rust conference, a small one-day event in Berkeley: http://rustcamp.com/ We'll be using the experience from this proto-conference as a guide for larger events in the future, so even if you can't go we'd love to get your feedback as to what you'd like to see from a Rust conference.

If I wasn't going to be on vacation during that conference, I would be strongly tempted to go, and I haven't written a line of rust. I get excited about every rust submission I see on HN though, and greedily gobble up as much information as I can. I can't help it, Rust just excites me.

So, whatever you guys are doing, WRT marketing, you are doing something right.

Sorry, it took us a while to find a venue and pull together initial sponsorship funding (ultimately provided by Jane Street, Skylight, and Mozilla), which resulted in us only announcing the date of the conference about a month ago. Next year we should be able to announce much further in advance, so maybe you'll be able to schedule your vacation around it. :)

What I like about rust is how I think it will go together really well with a language like idris. The idea is, whatever rust cannot guarantee an idris-to-rust transpiler can. People should have a much easier time making solid low-level code in the future.

What about Rust and Idris make them go together? Or how would they go together?

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/atom

Imagine atom, written in idris, and compiling to rust. Things like that.

I can't really imagine rust being a better target than C-- or something at that point, as you've got an infallible machine managing your memory already. If you output code that is rejected by the rust lifetime checker, you've still got a problem.

Rust as a target for projects like atom instead of C could lead to easier/safer/faster atom development.

Idris is already more safe than Rust. What would this give you?

Unfortunately safety is not the only concern. Idris' tooling is severely limited. There are very few executables written in Idris (and even fewer that aren't bit-rotted), the build tooling and package management are very simple, the runtime is heavily optimized, concurrent or parallel (like GHC's) and the single-threaded performance is far from Rust's.

I want to be clear that I'm not hating on Idris I love the goals of the project and am probably one of the few people outside the core contributors who has written a backend for the compiler, but you can't really compare a production quality compiler with a full time team of 10 or so to a research compiler worked on by researchers (who have different goals) and volunteers.

Edit: To clarify for this reason I could see why it would be cool to be able to write some critical code in Idris and extract to Rust where you could get performance and tooling for the rest of your application.

1.2 (which was stabilized today) is also a mostly-quality release (`const fn` and associated constants landed behind a feature gate, but are still not-really-done).

Indeed, the 1.2 development cycle was relatively sleepy as the preceding six months were spent in crunch mode preparing for 1.0, and everyone was eager for a bit of summer vacation. :) A lot of this cycle has also been spent prioritizing for future language development and organizing the new subteams. But I'd still say that 1.2 managed to get a lot done, since there's just so much low hanging fruit wrt stdlib APIs to stabilize.

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