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Note 0.5 priorities
I personally think a good overarching goal for 0.5 would be to "unblock" the development of strong standard libraries. It is my opinion that the single biggest blocker here is our incomplete trait implementation. In particular:
- there are bugs around explicit self, not all of which have issues associated with them;
- default methods and trait inheritance don't really work;
- we need a deriving-like solution for implementing repetitive traits like Eq, IterBytes, Serialize, and so forth;
- some lingering decisions on precisely what kinds of impls will be allowed (I have an in-progress blog pending on this post...) to avoid theoretical quandries when resolving;
- @Trait, &Trait, and ~Trait do not really work.
Fixing those things, primarily the first three, strikes me as very high priority. It would allow us to define nice trait hierarchies similar to the ones found in Haskell/Clojure (Eq, Ord, Hash, etc) which form the foundation of a strong library design.
There are various bugs in the region type system implementation. I will go through and collect some issue numbers later. They ought to be fixed.
It's difficult to write libraries presently that have "recoverable" failure modes. We've long talked about a pattern for this using TLS. We gained TLS in 0.4. We should give this a try in 0.5, it'll help a lot in writing reasonable libraries.
Probably won't be time to finish this, but a new driver, as well as a maintainer-mode tool for bootstrapping the compiler and doing tasks currently done via 'make' (rather than using the makefile) should at least get started. Also probably involves adding a top-level rust command and renaming subtools a bit.
Ideally Rust's build system will use cargo for dependency resolution and provide reusable components for others'. Servo has a complex build using awful makefiles that would be better managed by cargo or a cargo-based build tool.
The build time is a regular source of complaint during development, and it limits a lot of what we can get done in a day. We should spend some energy on speeding this cycle up and making sure everyone's able to build as quickly and in-parallel as possible.
Switching our build system over to buildbot (now reviewed and in testing) will be good here. Bringing more and faster build slaves into production. And teaching the automation to do integration builds for us rather than bouncing off incoming.
We should also experiment with some more-structured code review, as our velocity slows and we start focusing on quality and performance issues in this and subsequent releases.
Including modes, export, structural Records, #-macros, [mut], assert/log/fail, <-, <->
Our uv build is very, very far behind upstream, and simply doesn't work on 32-bit x86 because of rustc bugs.
Cargo has some pretty nice capabilities but we haven't fully committed to it yet. Servo (and maybe Rust) should be using cargo to manage their dependencies and installation. I'm imagining this has a lot of overlap with the rewrite of Rust's build system.
Keeping out-of-tree code up to date has become a very labor-intensive process, and our support for out-of-tree libraries is bad. I very much want to set up a continuous integration server for the entire community. Doing this completely in Rust helps uv, cargo, and servo, and is fun.
There are a few things I would like to do to clean up the build, including making all crates libraries so they can be used by other tools, fixing the weird organization of librustc and its driver, splitting rustllvm out into its own crate with bindings, ditto clang, refactoring the top-level rustc code so that it is more approachable to newcomers, merging rt and core, moving the native uv and compression code to std.
The JIT compiler passes about 92% tests, give or take a few on different platforms (Windows hasn't even been tested). The failing tests are caused by segfaults, illegal instructions and the occasional task failure. Being able to have all Rust code running perfectly under JIT on all platforms would be an amazing feature of 0.5.
If we are going to do it, it needs to be sooner than later, as it is another disruptive change.
http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2012/10/01/moves-based-on-type/