Today, we are happy to announce the release of Rust 1.0.0.alpha.2! Rust is a systems programming language pursuing the trifecta: safe, fast, and concurrent.

In accordance with our status report last week, this is a second alpha release, rather than a first beta release. The beta release will be six weeks from today, with the final coming six weeks after that.

We’ve managed to land almost all of the features previously expected for this cycle. The big headline here is that all major API revisions are finished: path and IO reform have landed. At this point, all modules shipping for 1.0 are in what we expect to be their final form, modulo minor tweaks during the alpha2 cycle. See the previous post for more details.

This coming release cycle is crucial to Rust, as this will be the last cycle that we recommend nightly builds for most users. Part of the way through the cycle, around March 9th, we expect to have all major functionality we expect in 1.0 marked as stable; we will fill in stability gaps between then and beta on March 31st. The beta release will fully introduce the "stable channel", which will not allow use of unstable features but will guarantee backwards-compatibility (after 1.0). Unstable features will only be available in nightly.

For more detail, please see the Release notes.

Thank you to all 201 contributors for this release: