What’s Coming in Rust 2024? A Deep Dive into the New Language Goals

Reading note: The Rust team’s core goal includes delivering Rust 2024, making async Rust comparable to sync Rust, and paving the way for Linux kernel development with Rust.

Rust Leadership Announces 26 Project Goals for H2 2024

The team will first complete the preparation work for Rust 2024. Two other key objectives are to bring the async Rust experience closer to sync Rust and to address the biggest stability obstacles for building the Linux kernel in Rust.

With about one‑third of 2024 remaining, the goals were published on August 12, reflecting the leadership’s mission to promote reliable and efficient software development.

The Rust leadership committee says the 2024 edition offers an opportunity to fix small ergonomic issues, making the language more user‑friendly.

Changes in Rust 2024 include support for -> impl Trait and async fn via adjusted capture behavior, reserving keywords for future async generators, and modifying fallback types.

The team plans to finish Rust 2024 development later this year. The planned version will be Rust v1.85, with a beta release on 3 January 2025 and a stable release on 20 February 2025.

For async Rust, several building‑block features are planned, notably support for async closures and Send boundaries, aiming to elevate async Rust to the same quality level as sync Rust.

Experimental support for Rust in the Linux kernel is seen as a watershed, demonstrating Rust’s suitability for low‑level system applications.

The remaining 23 goals affect a range of functionalities from single‑file scripts to ergonomic reference counting, including:

Stable prototype for const‑expanded “pharmacy” (translation unclear)

Reasons for administrator‑provided withdrawal boxes

Formulating the project goal list

Related type position impl traits

Addressing cargo‑semver‑checks merge obstacles

Const traits

Ergonomic counting

Exploring sandbox build scripts

Exposing experimental LLVM features for automatic differentiation and GPU offloading

Extending pubgrub to match Cargo’s dependency resolution

Implementing “merged doc tests” to save documentation testing time

Making Rustdoc Search easier to learn

Next‑generation trait solver

Optimizing Clippy and linting

Pattern for empty types

Nightly‑only extensible Polonius support

Stabilizing cargo‑script

Stabilizing doc_cfg

Stabilizing parallel front‑end

Investigating tool applicability to standard safety verification

Testing infrastructure and contributor compliance with a‑mir‑formality standards

Using annotate‑snippets for rustc diagnostic output

User‑scoped build cache

Not all goals are expected to be realized.

The latest Rust releases are 1.80 (published 25 July, featuring lazy types) and 1.80.1 (published 8 August, fixing two regressions: a floating‑point comparison compilation error and a false‑positive lint for dead_code).