The development team for Rust has announced that the alpha release of Rust 1.0 has been made. Rust is designed with a focus on systems programming and intends to provide the features of modern programming languages combined with the power of C/C++. This designation means that both the language and core libraries are considered feature-complete. With the exception of finding it necessary to fix previously undiscovered bugs, no breaking changes are anticipated between now and the official release of 1.0.
There are over 2400 changes (including bug fixes) contained in this alpha release, and the full details are provided in the release notes. Work remains on two prominent modules (path manipulation and I/O) but several features have been implemented in the language and the library. For the language this includes dynamically-size types, multidispatch traits, and Where clauses. For the library, consistent application of the conventions has been distributed throughout the stable sections of the standard
According to the project’s stability dashboard, the library currently has 44% of its code marked stable and 52% unstable (2% unmarked). This compares very favorably to a previous update in October 2014 when stable code was listed at 2%, 12% unstable, and 77% marked experimental (remainder deprecated or unmarked).
Installation binaries are available on the big 3 platforms (Linux / Windows / Mac OS X) and source is available for the remainder. Note that the Rust team recommends using the nightly builds in order to benefit from any changes made during the alpha phase. The first beta release is scheduled for the week of February 16, 2015.