Merge pull request #78 from steveklabnik/1.7-announcement

1.7 release announcement

Author: steveklabnik

_posts/2016-03-02-Rust-1.7.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Announcing Rust 1.7"
+author: The Rust Core Team
+---
+
+The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.7. Rust is a
+systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.
+
+As always, you can [install Rust 1.7][install] from the appropriate page on our
+website, and check out the [detailed release notes for 1.7][notes] on GitHub.
+About 1300 patches were landed in this release.
+
+[install]: https://www.rust-lang.org/install.html
+[notes]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/stable/RELEASES.md#version-170-2016-03-03
+
+### What's in 1.7 stable
+
+This release is primarily about library features. While we have several
+language features cooking for future releases, the timeframe in which 1.7 was
+developed included the holidays, which means less time for commenting on GitHub
+and more time for spending with loved ones.
+
+#### Library stabilizations
+
+About 40 library functions and methods are now stable in 1.7. One of the
+largest APIs stabilized  was support for custom hash algorithms in the standard
+library’s `HashMap<K, V>` type. Previously all hash maps would use [SipHash] as
+the hashing algorithm, which provides protection against DOS attacks by
+default. SipHash, however, is [not very fast] at hashing small keys. As shown,
+however, the [FNV hash algorithm] is much faster for these size of inputs. This
+means that by switching hash algorithms for types like `HashMap<usize, V>`
+there can be a significant speedup so long as the loss of DOS protection is
+acceptable. 
+
+[Siphash]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SipHash
+[not very fast]: http://cglab.ca/~abeinges/blah/hash-rs/
+[FNV hash algorithm]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowler%E2%80%93Noll%E2%80%93Vo_hash_function
+
+To see this in action, you can check out the [fnv crate] on [crates.io] and
+create a `HashMap` via:
+
+```rust
+extern crate fnv;
+
+use std::collections::HashMap;                            
+use std::hash::BuildHasherDefault;                        
+use fnv::FnvHasher;                                       
+                                                          
+type MyHasher = BuildHasherDefault<FnvHasher>;            
+                                                          
+fn main() {
+    let mut map: HashMap<_, _, MyHasher> = HashMap::default();
+    map.insert(1, "Hello");                                   
+    map.insert(2, ", world!");                                
+    println!("{:?}", map);
+}
+```
+
+[fnv crate]: https://crates.io/crates/fnv
+[crates.io]: https://crates.io
+
+
+Note that most of the time you don’t even need to specify the hasher as type
+inference will take care of it, so `HashMap::default()` should be all you need
+to get up to 2x faster hashes. It’s also worth pointing out that [`Hash`] trait
+is agnostic to the hashing algorithm used, so no changes are needed to the
+types being inserted into hash maps to reap the benefits!
+
+[`Hash`]: http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/hash/trait.Hash.html
+
+Other notable improvements include:
+
+* `<[T]>::clone_from_slice()`, an efficient way to copy the data from one slice
+  and put it into another slice.
+* Various convenience methods on `Ipv4Addr` and `Ipv6Addr`, such as `is_loopback()`,
+  which returns `true` or `false` if the address is a loopback address according to
+  RFC 6890.
+* Various improvements to `CString`, used for FFI.
+* checked, saturated, and overflowing operations for various numeric types.
+  These aren’t counted in that ‘40’ number above, because there are a _lot_ of
+  them, but they all do the same thing.
+
+See the [detailed release notes][notes] for more.
+
+#### Cargo features
+
+There were a few small updates to Cargo:
+
+* An [improvement to build scripts] that allows them to precisely inform Cargo
+  about dependences to ensure that they’re only rerun when those files change.
+  This should help development quite a bit in repositories with build scripts.
+* A [modification to the `cargo rustc` subcommand], which allows specifying
+  profiles to pull in dev-dependencies during testing and such.
+
+
+[improvment to build scripts]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/2279 
+[modification to the `cargo rustc` subcommand]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/2224 
+
+### Contributors to 1.7
+
+We had 144 individuals contribute to 1.7. Thank you so much!
+
+* Aaron Turon
+* Adam Perry
+* Adrian Heine
+* Aidan Hobson Sayers
+* Aleksey Kladov
+* Alexander Lopatin
+* Alex Burka
+* Alex Crichton
+* Ali Clark
+* Amanieu d’Antras
+* Andrea Bedini
+* Andrea Canciani
+* Andre Bogus
+* Andrew Barchuk
+* Andrew Paseltiner
+* angelsl
+* Anton Blanchard
+* arcnmx
+* Ariel Ben-Yehuda
+* arthurprs
+* ashleysommer
+* Barosl Lee
+* Benjamin Herr
+* Björn Steinbrink
+* bors
+* Brandon W Maister
+* Brian Anderson
+* Brian Campbell
+* Carlos E. Garcia
+* Chad Shaffer
+* Corey Farwell
+* Daan Sprenkels
+* Daniel Campbell
+* Daniel Robertson
+* Dave Hodder
+* Dave Huseby
+* dileepb
+* Dirk Gadsden
+* Eduard Burtescu
+* Erick Tryzelaar
+* est31
+* Evan
+* Fabrice Desré
+* fbergr
+* Felix Gruber
+* Felix S. Klock II
+* Florian Hahn
+* Geoff Catlin
+* Geoffrey Thomas
+* Georg Brandl
+* ggomez
+* Gleb Kozyrev
+* Gökhan Karabulut
+* Greg Chapple
+* Guillaume Bonnet
+* Guillaume Gomez
+* Ivan Kozik
+* Jack O’Connor
+* Jeffrey Seyfried
+* Johan Lorenzo
+* Johannes Oertel
+* John Hodge
+* John Kåre Alsaker
+* Jonas Schievink
+* Jonathan Reem
+* Jonathan S
+* Jorge Aparicio
+* Josh Stone
+* Kamal Marhubi
+* Katze
+* Keith Yeung
+* Kenneth Koski
+* Kevin Stock
+* Luke Jones
+* Manish Goregaokar
+* Marc Bowes
+* Marvin Löbel
+* Masood Malekghassemi
+* Matt Brubeck
+* Mátyás Mustoha
+* Michael Huynh
+* Michael Neumann
+* Michael Woerister
+* mitaa
+* mopp
+* Nathan Kleyn
+* Nicholas Mazzuca
+* Nick Cameron
+* Nikita Baksalyar
+* Niko Matsakis
+* NODA, Kai
+* nxnfufunezn
+* Olaf Buddenhagen
+* Oliver ‘ker’ Schneider
+* Oliver Middleton
+* Oliver Schneider
+* Pascal Hertleif
+* Paul Dicker
+* Paul Smith
+* Peter Atashian
+* Peter Kolloch
+* petevine
+* Pierre Krieger
+* Piotr Czarnecki
+* Prayag Verma
+* qpid
+* Ravi Shankar
+* Reeze Xia
+* Richard Bradfield
+* Robin Kruppe
+* rphmeier
+* Ruud van Asseldonk
+* Ryan Thomas
+* Sandeep Datta
+* Scott Olson
+* Scott Whittaker
+* Sean Leffler
+* Sean McArthur
+* Sebastian Hahn
+* Sebastian Wicki
+* Sébastien Marie
+* Seo Sanghyeon
+* Sergey Veselkov
+* Simonas Kazlauskas
+* Simon Sapin
+* Stepan Koltsov
+* Stephan Hügel
+* Steve Klabnik
+* Steven Allen
+* Steven Fackler
+* Tamir Duberstein
+* tgor
+* Thomas Wickham
+* Thomas Winwood
+* Tobias Bucher
+* Tomasz Miąsko
+* tormol
+* Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
+* Ulrik Sverdrup
+* Vadim Petrochenkov
+* Vincent Esche
+* Vlad Ureche
+* Wangshan Lu
+* Wesley Wiser