Announcing Rust 1.64.0

The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.64.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, you can get 1.64.0 with:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.64.0 on GitHub.

If you'd like to help us out by testing future releases, you might consider updating locally to use the beta channel (rustup default beta) or the nightly channel (rustup default nightly). Please report any bugs you might come across!

What's in 1.64.0 stable

Enhancing `.await` with `IntoFuture`

Rust 1.64 stabilizes the IntoFuture trait. IntoFuture is a trait similar to IntoIterator, but rather than supporting for ... in ... loops, IntoFuture changes how .await works. With IntoFuture, the .await keyword can await more than just futures; it can await anything which can be converted into a Future via IntoFuture - which can help make your APIs more user-friendly!

Take for example a builder which constructs requests to some storage provider over the network:

pub struct Error { ... }
pub struct StorageResponse { ... }:
pub struct StorageRequest(bool);

impl StorageRequest {
    /// Create a new instance of `StorageRequest`.
    pub fn new() -> Self { ... }
    /// Decide whether debug mode should be enabled.
    pub fn set_debug(self, b: bool) -> Self { ... }
    /// Send the request and receive a response.
    pub async fn send(self) -> Result<StorageResponse, Error> { ... }
}

Typical usage would likely look something like this:

let response = StorageRequest::new()  // 1. create a new instance
    .set_debug(true)                  // 2. set some option
    .send()                           // 3. construct the future
    .await?;                          // 4. run the future + propagate errors

This is not bad, but we can do better here. Using IntoFuture we can combine "construct the future" (line 3) and "run the future" (line 4) into a single step:

let response = StorageRequest::new()  // 1. create a new instance
    .set_debug(true)                  // 2. set some option
    .await?;                          // 3. construct + run the future + propagate errors

We can do this by implementing IntoFuture for StorageRequest. IntoFuture requires us to have a named future we can return, which we can do by creating a "boxed future" and defining a type alias for it:

// First we must import some new types into the scope.
use std::pin::Pin;
use std::future::{Future, IntoFuture};

pub struct Error { ... }
pub struct StorageResponse { ... }
pub struct StorageRequest(bool);

impl StorageRequest {
    /// Create a new instance of `StorageRequest`.
    pub fn new() -> Self { ... }
    /// Decide whether debug mode should be enabled.
    pub fn set_debug(self, b: bool) -> Self { ... }
    /// Send the request and receive a response.
    pub async fn send(self) -> Result<StorageResponse, Error> { ... }
}

// The new implementations:
// 1. create a new named future type
// 2. implement `IntoFuture` for `StorageRequest`
pub type StorageRequestFuture = Pin<Box<dyn Future<Output = Result<StorageResponse, Error>> + Send + 'static>>
impl IntoFuture for StorageRequest {
    type IntoFuture = StorageRequestFuture;
    type Output = <StorageRequestFuture as Future>::Output;
    fn into_future(self) -> Self::IntoFuture {
        Box::pin(self.send())
    }
}

This takes a bit more code to implement, but provides a simpler API for users.

In the future, the Rust Async WG hopes to simplify the creating new named futures by supporting impl Trait in type aliases (Type Alias Impl Trait or TAIT). This should make implementing IntoFuture easier by simplifying the type alias' signature, and make it more performant by removing the Box from the type alias.

C-compatible FFI types in core and alloc

When calling or being called by C ABIs, Rust code can use type aliases like c_uint or c_ulong to match the corresponding types from C on any target, without requiring target-specific code or conditionals.

Previously, these type aliases were only available in std, so code written for embedded targets and other scenarios that could only use core or alloc could not use these types.

Rust 1.64 now provides all of the c_* type aliases in core::ffi, as well as core::ffi::CStr for working with C strings. Rust 1.64 also provides alloc::ffi::CString for working with owned C strings using only the alloc crate, rather than the full std library.

rust-analyzer is now available via rustup

rust-analyzer is now included as part of the collection of tools included with Rust. This makes it easier to download and access rust-analyzer, and makes it available on more platforms. It is available as a rustup component which can be installed with:

rustup component add rust-analyzer

At this time, to run the rustup-installed version, you need to invoke it this way:

rustup run stable rust-analyzer

The next release of rustup will provide a built-in proxy so that running the executable rust-analyzer will launch the appropriate version.

Most users should continue to use the releases provided by the rust-analyzer team (available on the rust-analyzer releases page), which are published more frequently. Users of the official VSCode extension are not affected since it automatically downloads and updates releases in the background.

Cargo improvements: workspace inheritance and multi-target builds

When working with collections of related libraries or binary crates in one Cargo workspace, you can now avoid duplication of common field values between crates, such as common version numbers, repository URLs, or rust-version. This also helps keep these values in sync between crates when updating them. For more details, see workspace.package, workspace.dependencies, and "inheriting a dependency from a workspace".

When building for multiple targets, you can now pass multiple --target options to cargo build, to build all of those targets at once. You can also set build.target to an array of multiple targets in .cargo/config.toml to build for multiple targets by default.

Stabilized APIs

The following methods and trait implementations are now stabilized:

These types were previously stable in std::ffi, but are now also available in core and alloc:

These types were previously stable in std::os::raw, but are now also available in core::ffi and std::ffi:

We've stabilized some helpers for use with Poll, the low-level implementation underneath futures:

In the future, we hope to provide simpler APIs that require less use of low-level details like Poll and Pin, but in the meantime, these helpers make it easier to write such code.

These APIs are now usable in const contexts:

slice::from_raw_parts

Compatibility notes

As previously announced, linux targets now require at least Linux kernel 3.2 (except for targets which already required a newer kernel), and linux-gnu targets now require glibc 2.17 (except for targets which already required a newer glibc).
Rust 1.64.0 changes the memory layout of Ipv4Addr, Ipv6Addr, SocketAddrV4 and SocketAddrV6 to be more compact and memory efficient. This internal representation was never exposed, but some crates relied on it anyway by using std::mem::transmute, resulting in invalid memory accesses. Such internal implementation details of the standard library are never considered a stable interface. To limit the damage, we worked with the authors of all of the still-maintained crates doing so to release fixed versions, which have been out for more than a year. The vast majority of impacted users should be able to mitigate with a cargo update.
As part of the RLS deprecation, this is also the last release containing a copy of RLS. Starting from Rust 1.65.0, RLS will be replaced by a small LSP server showing the deprecation warning.

Other changes

There are other changes in the Rust 1.64 release, including:

Windows builds of the Rust compiler now use profile-guided optimization, providing performance improvements of 10-20% for compiling Rust code on Windows.
If you define a struct containing fields that are never used, rustc will warn about the unused fields. Now, in Rust 1.64, you can enable the unused_tuple_struct_fields lint to get the same warnings about unused fields in a tuple struct. In future versions, we plan to make this lint warn by default. Fields of type unit (()) do not produce this warning, to make it easier to migrate existing code without having to change tuple indices.

Check out everything that changed in Rust, Cargo, and Clippy.

Contributors to 1.64.0

Many people came together to create Rust 1.64.0. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks!