Today we're releasing Rust 1.5 stable. This post gives the highlights, and you can find the full details in the release notes.

What's in 1.5 stable

The biggest news with Rust 1.5 is the introduction of cargo install , a new subcommand that installs Cargo application packages on the local system. This tool offers a painless way to distribute Rust applications.

The community is already taking advantage of cargo install to install applications like rustfmt, the work-in-progress code formatting tool for Rust. Moreover, cargo install can also be used to install new subcommands for Cargo itself:

cargo-check : statically check a project, but don't build a binary.

: statically check a project, but don't build a binary. cargo-edit : add or remove dependencies for a project through the command line.

: add or remove dependencies for a project through the command line. cargo-graph : build dependency graphs for a project using GraphViz.

: build dependency graphs for a project using GraphViz. cargo-watch : automatically re-run a Cargo command when the project changes.

(You can find more with a crates.io search.)

In addition to these tooling changes, Rust 1.5 sees a large number of library API stabilizations, especially around the interaction of paths and the file system.

Finally, there were a few improvements to compile times, and crate metadata shrunk by about 20%.

Contributors to 1.5

The Rust community continues to do incredible work, and we'd like to thank the 152 contributors to this release: