Subteam reports 2016-02-01

[aturon]

Lang

Full report

This week we discussed and made decisions on several nominated issues and PRs, including:

• Remove volatile semantics for atomics (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/30962)
  • Merge, perhaps while adding additional operations with volatile semantics.
• Loosen restriction around use/extern crate in blocks (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/31144)
  • Merge, consider lint in the long run.
• Accessing variants through a type alias (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/31179)
  • Close; given some of the tricky questions that have come up, we’d like an RFC here.
• Unsafely ascribe 'static bounds (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/31196)
  • Close in favor of an RFC.

We reached a basic decision on the ?/try/catch RFC, which is that we plan to merge the RFC. However, there remains some bikeshedding to be done, so we will have one more week of FCP to sort out the keywords:

• FCP PR #243: Trait-based exception handling

We moved two features into final comment period (FCP) for stabilization in Rust 1.8:

• FCP Issue #28235: Tracking issue for overloaded += operators (RFC 953) (feature augmented_assignments)
• FCP Issue #29720: Tracking issue for braced_empty_structs (RFC 218)

Finally, we brought two RFCs into final comment period (FCP):

• FCP PR #1210: RFC: impl specialization
• FCP PR #1445: Restrict constants in patterns

Libs

Full report

This week we moved several RFCs into final comment period (FCP):

• FCP PR #1299: std::sync::mpsc::SharedSender
• FCP PR #1353: Add retain_mut to Vec and VecDeque
• FCP PR #1359: RFC: Add CommandExt::{exec, before_exec}
• FCP PR #1415: RFC: Deprecate type aliases in std::os::*::raw
• FCP PR #1423: Amend RFC 1270 to describe actual implementation

We also selected unstable APIs to consider for stabilization or deprecation in Rust 1.8:

• str::encode_utf16
  • Recommendation: stabilize (renamed from utf16_units)
• scoped tls
  • Recommendation: deprecate (move to crates.io probably)
• cell extras
  • Recommendation: stabilize map, deprecate filter_map, also handle other guard types
• Condvar::wait_timeout_with
  • Recommendation: deprecate
• raw ptr as_ref
  • On the fence, comments welcome!
• make_ascii_uppercase
  • Recommendation: deprecate
• drop_in_place
  • Recommendation: stabilize, but would like comments on *mut T vs &mut T
• overloaded += operators
  • Recommendation: stabilize
• std::time
  • Recommendation: stabilize, but rename duration_from_earlier
• panic::recover
  • Recommendation: neither stabilize nor deprecate, but we would like to make a decision for the 1.9 release, so we’re trying to instigate early discussion about this controversial API.

Tools

Full report

This was a busy past few weeks for the tools in Rust, especially in the realm of Cargo!

• An initial port for powerpc64 and powerpc64le targets has been added.
• Static libraries and import libraries for MSVC have been renamed to have more conventional names on Windows.
• Binaries on Linux and BSDs now have the NX bit set. This brings these platforms in line with the behavior on Windows and OSX.
• A new cargo init subcommand has been implemented to initialize pre-existing Rust projects with Cargo configuration.
• A new cargo metadata subcommand has been implemented to learn about a Cargo project through the CLI via JSON output.
• The meaning of cargo install as a plain command has been changed to install the current crate (e.g. the one at $PWD).
• A new project.publish key in Cargo.toml has been added to indicate that a crate cannot be published to crates.io.