Rust 1.1 stable, the Community Subteam, and RustCamp

We're happy to announce the completion of the first release cycle after Rust 1.0: today we are releasing Rust 1.1 stable, as well as 1.2 beta.

Read on for details the releases, as well as some exciting new developments within the Rust community.

What's in 1.1 Stable

One of the highest priorities for Rust after its 1.0 has been improving compile times. Thanks to the hard work of a number of contributors, Rust 1.1 stable provides a 32% improvement in compilation time over Rust 1.0 (as measured by bootstrapping).

Another major focus has been improving error messages throughout the compiler. Again thanks to a number of contributors, a large portion of compiler errors now include extended explanations accessible using the --explain flag.

Beyond these improvements, the 1.1 release includes a number of important new features:

New std::fs APIs. This release stabilizes a large set of extensions to the filesystem APIs, making it possible, for example, to compile Cargo on stable Rust.
musl support. It's now possible to target musl on Linux. Binaries built this way are statically linked and have zero dependencies. Nightlies are on the way.
cargo rustc. It's now possible to build a Cargo package while passing arbitrary flags to the final rustc invocation.

More detail is available in the release notes.

What's in 1.2 Beta

Performance improvements didn't stop with 1.1 stable. Benchmark compilations are showing an additional 30% improvement from 1.1 stable to 1.2 beta; Cargo's main crate compiles 18% faster.

In addition, parallel codegen is working again, and can substantially speed up large builds in debug mode; it gets another 33% speedup on bootstrapping on a 4 core machine. It's not yet on by default, but will be in the near future.

Cargo has also seen some performance improvements, including a 10x speedup on large "no-op" builds (from 5s to 0.5s on Servo), and shared target directories that cache dependencies across multiple packages.

In addition to all of this, 1.2 beta includes our first support for MSVC (Microsoft Visual C): the compiler is able to bootstrap, and we have preliminary nightlies targeting the platform. This is a big step for our Windows support, making it much easier to link Rust code against code built using the native toolchain. Unwinding is not yet available -- code aborts on panic -- but the implementation is otherwise complete, and all rust-lang crates are now testing on MSVC as a first-tier platform.

Rust 1.2 stable will be released six weeks from now, together with 1.3 beta.

Community news

In addition to the above technical work, there's some exciting news within the Rust community.

In the past few weeks, we've formed a new subteam explicitly devoted to supporting the Rust community. The team will have a number of responsibilities, including aggregating resources for meetups and other events, supporting diversity in the community through leadership in outreach, policies, and awareness-raising, and working with our early production users and the core team to help guide prioritization.

In addition, we'll soon be holding the first official Rust conference: RustCamp, on August 1, 2015, in Berkeley, CA, USA. We've received a number of excellent talk submissions, and are expecting a great program.

Contributors to 1.1

As with every release, 1.1 stable is the result of work from an amazing and active community. Thanks to the 168 contributors to this release:

Aaron Gallagher
Aaron Turon
Abhishek Chanda
Adolfo Ochagavía
Alex Burka
Alex Crichton
Alexander Polakov
Alexis Beingessner
Andreas Tolfsen
Andrei Oprea
Andrew Paseltiner
Andrew Straw
Andrzej Janik
Aram Visser
Ariel Ben-Yehuda
Avdi Grimm
Barosl Lee
Ben Gesoff
Björn Steinbrink
Brad King
Brendan Graetz
Brian Anderson
Brian Campbell
Carol Nichols
Chris Morgan
Chris Wong
Clark Gaebel
Cole Reynolds
Colin Walters
Conrad Kleinespel
Corey Farwell
David Reid
Diggory Hardy
Dominic van Berkel
Don Petersen
Eduard Burtescu
Eli Friedman
Erick Tryzelaar
Felix S. Klock II
Florian Hahn
Florian Hartwig
Franziska Hinkelmann
FuGangqiang
Garming Sam
Geoffrey Thomas
Geoffry Song
Graydon Hoare
Guillaume Gomez
Hech
Heejong Ahn
Hika Hibariya
Huon Wilson
Isaac Ge
J Bailey
Jake Goulding
James Perry
Jan Andersson
Jan Bujak
Jan-Erik Rediger
Jannis Redmann
Jason Yeo
Johann
Johann Hofmann
Johannes Oertel
John Gallagher
John Van Enk
Jordan Humphreys
Joseph Crail
Kang Seonghoon
Kelvin Ly
Kevin Ballard
Kevin Mehall
Krzysztof Drewniak
Lee Aronson
Lee Jeffery
Liigo Zhuang
Luke Gallagher
Luqman Aden
Manish Goregaokar
Marin Atanasov Nikolov
Mathieu Rochette
Mathijs van de Nes
Matt Brubeck
Michael Park
Michael Rosenberg
Michael Sproul
Michael Wu
Michał Czardybon
Mike Boutin
Mike Sampson
Ms2ger
Nelo Onyiah
Nicholas
Nicholas Mazzuca
Nick Cameron
Nick Hamann
Nick Platt
Niko Matsakis
Oliver Schneider
P1start
Pascal Hertleif
Paul Banks
Paul Faria
Paul Quint
Pete Hunt
Peter Marheine
Philip Munksgaard
Piotr Czarnecki
Poga Po
Przemysław Wesołek
Ralph Giles
Raphael Speyer
Ricardo Martins
Richo Healey
Rob Young
Robin Kruppe
Robin Stocker
Rory O’Kane
Ruud van Asseldonk
Ryan Prichard
Sean Bowe
Sean McArthur
Sean Patrick Santos
Shmuale Mark
Simon Kern
Simon Sapin
Simonas Kazlauskas
Sindre Johansen
Skyler
Steve Klabnik
Steven Allen
Steven Fackler
Swaroop C H
Sébastien Marie
Tamir Duberstein
Theo Belaire
Thomas Jespersen
Tincan
Ting-Yu Lin
Tobias Bucher
Toni Cárdenas
Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
Ulrik Sverdrup
Vadim Chugunov
Valerii Hiora
Wangshan Lu
Wei-Ming Yang
Wojciech Ogrodowczyk
Xuefeng Wu
York Xiang
Young Wu
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