Announcing Rust 1.63.0

The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.63.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, you can get 1.63.0 with:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.63.0 on GitHub.

If you'd like to help us out by testing future releases, you might consider updating locally to use the beta channel (rustup default beta) or the nightly channel (rustup default nightly). Please report any bugs you might come across!

What's in 1.63.0 stable

Scoped threads

Rust code could launch new threads with std::thread::spawn since 1.0, but this function bounds its closure with 'static. Roughly, this means that threads currently must have ownership of any arguments passed into their closure; you can't pass borrowed data into a thread. In cases where the threads are expected to exit by the end of the function (by being join()'d), this isn't strictly necessary and can require workarounds like placing the data in an Arc.

Now, with 1.63.0, the standard library is adding scoped threads, which allow spawning a thread borrowing from the local stack frame. The std::thread::scope API provides the necessary guarantee that any spawned threads will have exited prior to itself returning, which allows for safely borrowing data. Here's an example:

let mut a = vec![1, 2, 3];
let mut x = 0;

std::thread::scope(|s| {
    s.spawn(|| {
        println!("hello from the first scoped thread");
        // We can borrow `a` here.
        dbg!(&a);
    });
    s.spawn(|| {
        println!("hello from the second scoped thread");
        // We can even mutably borrow `x` here,
        // because no other threads are using it.
        x += a[0] + a[2];
    });
    println!("hello from the main thread");
});

// After the scope, we can modify and access our variables again:
a.push(4);
assert_eq!(x, a.len());

Rust ownership for raw file descriptors/handles (I/O Safety)

Previously, Rust code working with platform APIs taking raw file descriptors (on unix-style platforms) or handles (on Windows) would typically work directly with a platform-specific representation of the descriptor (for example, a c_int, or the alias RawFd). For Rust bindings to such native APIs, the type system then failed to encode whether the API would take ownership of the file descriptor (e.g., close) or merely borrow it (e.g., dup).

Now, Rust provides wrapper types such as BorrowedFd and OwnedFd, which are marked as #[repr(transparent)], meaning that extern "C" bindings can directly take these types to encode the ownership semantics. See the stabilized APIs section for the full list of wrapper types stabilized in 1.63, currently, they are available on cfg(unix) platforms, Windows, and WASI.

We recommend that new APIs use these types instead of the previous type aliases (like RawFd).

`const` Mutex, RwLock, Condvar initialization

The Condvar::new, Mutex::new, and RwLock::new functions are now callable in const contexts, which allows avoiding the use of crates like lazy_static for creating global statics with Mutex, RwLock, or Condvar values. This builds on the work in 1.62 to enable thinner and faster mutexes on Linux.

Turbofish for generics in functions with `impl Trait`

For a function signature like fn foo<T>(value: T, f: impl Copy), it was an error to specify the concrete type of T via turbofish: foo::<u32>(3, 3) would fail with:

error[E0632]: cannot provide explicit generic arguments when `impl Trait` is used in argument position
 --> src/lib.rs:4:11
  |
4 |     foo::<u32>(3, 3);
  |           ^^^ explicit generic argument not allowed
  |
  = note: see issue #83701 <https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/83701> for more information

In 1.63, this restriction is relaxed, and the explicit type of the generic can be specified. However, the impl Trait parameter, despite desugaring to a generic, remains opaque and cannot be specified via turbofish.

Non-lexical lifetimes migration complete

As detailed in this blog post, we've fully removed the previous lexical borrow checker from rustc across all editions, fully enabling the non-lexical, new, version of the borrow checker. Since the borrow checker doesn't affect the output of rustc, this won't change the behavior of any programs, but it completes a long-running migration (started in the initial stabilization of NLL for the 2018 edition) to deliver the full benefits of the new borrow checker across all editions of Rust. For most users, this change will bring slightly better diagnostics for some borrow checking errors, but will not otherwise impact which code they can write.

You can read more about non-lexical lifetimes in this section of the 2018 edition announcement.

Stabilized APIs

The following methods and trait implementations are now stabilized:

These APIs are now usable in const contexts:

Other changes

There are other changes in the Rust 1.63.0 release. Check out what changed in Rust, Cargo, and Clippy.

Contributors to 1.63.0

Many people came together to create Rust 1.63.0. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks!