Developer Catchup: Rust 1.0 and Node reunification

Rust wakes up

First up, Rust has reached version 1.0, though this is an announcement that was hardly unexpected. It has a lot to live up to given the Rust web site goes for such unloaded language as “blazingly fast, prevents nearly all segfaults, and guarantees thread safety”. The real test for Rust, at least for me, is how well Servo, Mozilla’s browser written in Rust and the application Rust was created with in mind. It seems this is the best possible test case, so…

There’s already a minimised ARM port which looks to bring Rust’s safety features to RTOS/embedded environments and I’ve come across some systems programmers who are interested in Rust, but not noted much momentum. Rust is living in the higher 50 (51-100) of the Tiobe index which is a very approximate guesstimate at momentum, but better than nothing. What this says to me is that despite arriving at 1.0 complete with packaging system and more, Rust is going to have a long journey ahead of it.

Node reunifies

Back in December, when Node.js and io.js forked, I expressed the hope that it would be a positive fork. Well, now that fork is coming to an end with the reunification, under the umbrella of the Node Foundation. Except there won’t be any merging of code and the io.js repository is being turned into the node.js repository.

Io.js folks will join the Node Foundations technical committee and, going forward, the next Node.js will be based on Io.js code. It’s well done to Io.js for taking action and making good practical and solid engineering steps that made it practically a no-brainer to take Node.js forward. We don’t seem to be completely done yet. The structure for future releases and development still needs nailing down.

So here’s looking forward to the next two releases of Node.js… the one which brings us all Io.js’s improvements like an up-to-date V8 JavaScript engines, and the one after which will probably come with more detail on how the desire for a faster development cycle and the need for stable long lived versions will be sorted out.

If you are looking to get your head around ES6, the next and arriving generation of JavaScript, try out Understanding ECMAScript 6, which is a CC-NC book via LeanPub – currently 30% complete and already full of useful details.