🦀 What’s New in 1.97.0
Today’s issue: Andrew Kelley’s Remarks, Polonius Nearing Stabilization, and Postgres Rust Rewrite
Hello Rustaceans!
In this issue, we cover the recent Rust release of 1.97.0, spotlight a project, and highlight 10 awesome links of the week.
Here’s issue 127.
MAIN NEWS
What’s New in 1.97.0
Last week, right after Andrew Kelley published some spicy constructive criticism on Bun’s Rust rewrite, the Rust release team shrugged and shipped 1.97.0 like the drama didn’t exist.
The big headline? Symbol mangling v0 is now stable and enabled by default. For years we’ve been stuck with Itanium ABI, generic params reduced to cryptic hashes, random inconsistencies that made custom demangling a recurring nightmare. The new scheme keeps the actual values intact, plays nicer across the board, and finally lets Rust speak its own language when it comes to linking. Legacy mangling? Banished to nightly exile with plans for full removal.
Cargo also grew up a bit: you can now control warning levels directly through Cargo instead of the ol’ RUSTFLAGS=-Dwarnings hack. The killer feature? It doesn’t nuke your build cache when you flip between allow and deny. Need silence while refactoring? CARGO_BUILD_WARNINGS=allow cargo check. CI being dramatic? deny mode plus --keep-going.
They also stopped hiding linker output by default. Turns out rustc was quietly sweeping linker complaints under the rug, now they show up as linker_messages warnings. Several bugs already squashed thanks to this change on nightly. If something annoying slips through, just allow the lint in your Cargo.toml.
A handful of nice stabilizations landed too, bit twiddling methods, some NonZero goodies, const char::is_control, and even Send for File on UEFI.
The usual improvements in Cargo and Clippy are there too. This release of 1.97 feels like Rust leveling up its tooling so you can keep shipping reliable code without the usual papercuts.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
rust-decimal
rust-decimal is a Decimal number implementation written in pure Rust suitable for financial calculations that require significant integral and fractional digits with no round-off errors.
What makes it genuinely fun to use:
The dec! macro: slap dec!(25.12) in your code and it parses at compile time.
First-class integration with Postgres, Diesel, Serde, and even no_std environments when you’re feeling minimal.
Battle-tested performance: they’ve been forward-porting speed wins from v1, so it’s not just correct, it’s quick.
Decimal is open-source at https://github.com/paupino/rust-decimal.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
The Clippy team published ‘Together for a healthier Clippy’, tackling review backlogs and maintainer burnout. New initiative: review someone else’s PR to get yours prioritized and merged faster.
Finally, Jarred published ‘Rewriting Bun in Rust’ via Claude AI in 11 days, fixing memory bugs, shrinking binaries, boosting stability and performance. Yeah… worth the wait.
Michael open-sourced pgrust, a full Postgres rewrite in Rust that’s now passing 100% of the PostgreSQL regression tests.
The recordings for the Rust Berlin Meetup is officially out. If you missed the livestream, now’s your chance to catch up. [video]
Copper-rs, the Rust-powered operating system for robots, has finally hit v1.0 stable. Huge congrats to the team on the milestone!
In other news, Polonius, the next-gen borrow checker is nearing stabilization with promising performance already.
Lukas wrote how PulseBeam cut WebRTC SFU P99.99 latency from 70ms to 10ms by migrating from Tokio work-stealing to thread-per-core architecture, gaining 25% capacity.
Luca and Vitaly talked about practical C/C++ to Rust migrations, covering incremental strategies, FFI challenges, cheadergen, and AI tools. [video]
Antoine wrote how exhaustive Rust struct destructuring catches missing fields at compile time, making refactors safer and preventing subtle bugs as data evolves.
Rust Bangalore is back. In-person meetup this Saturday the 18th at Juspay (First Floor, IndiQube Garden Tower A). Register before it’s too late.
Bonus
Andrew Kelley’s Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite.
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Wish you a productive week ahead, and actually make time to exercise a bit and drink more water, you animal.
See you next week!
John & Elley.