Amanieu D'Antras - The path to a stable ABI for Rust

Rust is well known for its API stability guarantees: code written for Rust 1.0 in 2015 still compiles with the latest compilers. However Rust has never had a stable ABI, which would enable Rust programs to use Rust libraries compiled with a different compiler version. The availability of a stable ABI is essential to allow Rust programs and libraries to be distributed in compiled form.Rust was not designed with a stable ABI as a primary goal, which is why this is still an unsolved problem almost a decade after the release of Rust 1.0. This talk will dive into the reasons why Rust's design makes a stable ABI tricky, and explore how these problems can be addressed.

[@HadrienG]

I wonder if some of this infrastructure could also be used to speed up debug builds by e.g. reducing the amount of code that needs to be recompiled when the implementation of a generic function changes. Basically, increase the scope of what incremental compilation can cache, at the expense of a bit more runtime indirection/overhead. For most of my cargo test builds, this would be a good tradeoff.