Rust Conference 2024: Main Announcements and Innovations

Rust Conference: Main Announcements

At the RustConf 2024 conference held in mid-October, the language development team presented a number of significant announcements that will shape the ecosystem's evolution for years to come. The event gathered over 2,000 participants online and offline in Berlin. We have compiled the most important highlights.

• New compiler based on Cranelift — an experimental backend for fast compilation in debug mode. Up to 3x speedup compared to the standard LLVM.
• Stabilization of async functions in traits — a long-awaited ability to write asynchronous methods in traits without additional crates and macros.
• Rust for embedded: official RISC-V support — a new target for microcontrollers with an open architecture.
• Plans for Rust 2025 — the roadmap includes improvements to incremental compilation, stabilization of const evaluation, and new syntax for match.

Key announcement: Cranelift as an alternative to LLVM — the project the team has been working on for the last two years is finally ready for testing. In cargo build mode with the -Zcodegen=cranelift flag, build times for medium-sized projects are reduced by 2-3 times. This is especially important for developers working on large codebases where every second of build time matters. Currently, support is limited to x86-64 and ARM64 platforms, but Windows support is promised for 2025.

Async functions in traits — a topic that has been discussed for years. Previously, implementing asynchronous behavior in traits required using crates like async-trait or complex wrappers. Now it is a built-in feature. Here is an example of code that now works out of the box:

pub trait AsyncProcessor {    async fn process(&self, data: &[u8]) -> Result<Vec<u8>, Error>;}

Embedded development received a powerful boost: in addition to RISC-V, a unified configuration system embedded-hal version 2.0 was announced, which simplifies porting code between different microcontrollers. A new tool probe-rs for debugging via JTAG/SWD was also presented — it is now part of the official Rust toolchain.

Safety and performance — the main themes of all talks. The Polonius project generated particular interest — a new implementation of the borrow checker that reduces false positive errors by 40% and allows writing more flexible code without sacrificing safety. Polonius is expected to become part of the stable compiler by the end of 2025.

The conference also noted community growth: the number of crates on crates.io exceeded 150,000, and the number of Rust Foundation members reached 50 companies, including new sponsors Samsung and ARM.

For those who want to start learning Rust, translations of official guides and example projects are available on the pythonlib.ru website. Stay tuned for updates — we will publish detailed breakdowns of each announcement.