Rust team announces 2024 development goals

Rust‘s leadership team has published a list of 26 project goals for the second half of 2024, leading off with finalizing preparations for the Rust 2024 edition. Two other key goals include bringing the async Rust experience closer to par with sync Rust, and resolving the biggest obstacles to the Linux kernel building on stable Rust.

Project goals for the remainder of the 2024 calendar year were published August 12. The goals were selected in accordance with Rust leadership’s mission of empowering development of reliable and efficient software. According to the Rust Leadership Council, the 2024 edition presents an opportunity to correct small, ergonomic issues that will make the language easier to use. Changes eyed for the 2024 edition include supporting ->impl Trait and async fn by aligning capture behavior; permitting (async) generators to be added in the future by reserving the gen keyword, and altering fallback for the! type. Plans call for finalizing development of Rust 2024 edition features later this year. The edition is planned for Rust v1.85, to be released in beta in January 3, 2025 and stable on February 20.

For async Rust, plans call for delivering several async building-block features, with the most notable being support for async closures and send bounds. This is part of a program to raise the experience of async Rust to the same level of quality as sync Rust.

Experimental support for Rust development in the Linux kernel is considered a watershed moment for Rust for Linux, demonstrating that Rust is capable of targeting all manners of low-level system applications.

The other 23 goals impact capabilities ranging from single-file scripts to ergonomic ref counting, as follows:

“Stabilizable” prototype for expanded const generics
Administrator-provided reasons for yanked crates
Assemble project goal slate
Associated type position impl trait
Begin resolving cargo-semver-checks blockers for merging into cargo
Const traits
Ergonomic ref-counting
Explore sandboxed build scripts
Expose experimental LLVM features for automatic differentiation and GPU offloading
Extend pubgrub to match cargo’s dependency resolution
Implement “merged doctests” to save doctest time
Make Rustdoc Search easier to learn
Next-generation trait solver
Optimizing Clippy & linting
Patterns of empty types
Scalable Polonius support on nightly
Stabilize cargo-script
Stabilize doc_cfg
Stabilize parallel front end
Survey tools suitability for Std safety verification
Testing infra + contributors for a-mir-formality
Use annotate-snippets for rustc diagnostic output
User-wide build cache

Not all goals are expected to be completed, however. The most recent editions of Rust include version 1.80, announced July 25 and featuring lazy types, and a point release, 1.80.1, published August 8 to fix two regressions—mis-compilation when comparing floats, and false positives in the dead_code lint.