A Rust frontend for GCC

Over the last two weeks I've had every git commit (and diff) emailed to me to get a feel for how the project is progressing. It is very exciting but the language is far from stable.

There is a tutorial that ships with Rust. It is the same as the online one but will be different if you download git HEAD because that's just how fast the language moves.

Shortly before I arrived there was a deprecation of '@' pointers, which appeared in the online tutorial. I've seen the tutorial updated to account for this, development on GC'd and ref-counted pointers which are supposed to replace '@' (which are unspecified "managed" pointers). I've also seen the deprecation of &fn "borrowed function" syntax in favor of something more precise with different syntax ('procedures' which are non-mutable in some sense and can be passed between tasks, and something mutable which can't, IIRC).

There was an LWN article in July which described the semantics of for loops and lambda functions. That stuff also changed before I started following the project.

The Rust source is written in Rust, and there are developers and enthusiasts on #rust on irc.mozilla.org. These two sources should help you to write rustic code. (But "rustic" will mean something different in a month no doubt, so you might want to wait for more stability. :))

It's very exciting development and I don't mean to give the impression that this is not a worthwhile language to learn. Just that in 2013/2014 the syntax is still a moving target and that you'd best not spend time writing massive amounts of code in it.

On the other hand, Rust's safe pointer model is quite mind-bending and worth getting a jump on. So there is a motivation for learning the language today.