Rust matures

The Rust team has introduced the latest version of the systems programming language -1.7, which continues the course of 1.6. What this release focuses on is library features -roughly 40 library functions and methods are currently stable in 1.7.
Two months after releasing Rust 1.6, the team is announcing the 1.7 version. According to the official blog post, this version is mainly about library features. “While we have several language features cooking for future releases, the timeframe in which 1.7 was developed included the holidays, which means less time for commenting on GitHub and more time for spending with loved ones,” the Rust team wrote.


Most significant changes in Rust 1.7
Unlike Rust 1.6, which focused on small refinements, one major feature and a change to Crates.io, 1.7 focuses on the roughly 40 library functions and methods that are now stable. The Rust team announced that one of the biggest APIs stabilized was support for custom hash algorithms in the standard library’s HashMap<K, V> type. Until now, all hash maps used SipHash as the hashing algorithm, which offers protection against DOS attacks by default. However, SipHash is not very fast at hashing small keys while the FNV hash algorithm is much faster for these size of inputs. As a result, a significant speedup occurs by switching hash algorithms for types such as HashMap<usize, V>, provided that the loss of DOS protection is acceptable.

–Jaxenter