The Rust 1.93 programming language, originally founded by the Mozilla project but now developed under the Rust Foundation, a non-profit organization, has been released. This language emphasizes memory safety and enables high task concurrency without the need for a garbage collector or extensive runtime. The runtime in Rust is limited to the basic initialization and maintenance of the standard library.
Rust’s memory management techniques eliminate common errors related to pointer manipulation and safeguard against issues stemming from low-level memory handling, such as null pointers, buffer overruns, and after-free access. To facilitate library distribution, ensure assembly, and manage dependencies, the project is working on the development of the Cargo package manager. Libraries can be hosted on the crates.io repository.
Memory safety in Rust is guaranteed during compile time through reference checking, object ownership tracking, consideration of object lifetime (scope), and evaluation of memory access at runtime. The language also provides protection against integer overflows, mandates the initialization of variable values before use, incorporates improved error handling in the standard library, defaults to immutable references and variables, and employs strong static typing to reduce logical errors.
Key innovations in the latest release include:
- Integration of the Musl C library within the Rust distribution, enabling static linking for target platforms “*-linux-musl” (e.g., aarch64-unknown-linux-musl, x86_64-unknown-linux-musl, powerpc64le-unknown-linux-musl). The library has been updated to version 1.2.5, with the minimum supported version for dynamic linking also raised to 1.2.5. The upgrade addresses issues with the DNS resolver implementation present in the previous version, Musl 1.2.3. Musl 1.2.4 introduced the ability to fallback to TCP when UDP requests fail, improving compatibility with recursive DNS servers and handling responses with long CNAME sequences. Musl 1.2.5 resolves an issue where large TCP responses were being discarded.