Rust 1.76 release: New ABI compatibility section and debugging function introduced

Rust, the fast and memory-efficient programming language, has announced the release of its version 1.76. This update is considered to be minor in nature, but still includes some interesting improvements.

A notable addition to this release is a new ABI Compatibility section in the function pointer documentation. This section explains the concept of ABI-compatible function signatures, with a significant focus on the compatibility of argument types and return types. The document includes a list of types currently deemed compatible in Rust. Notably, char and u32 are now guaranteed to be ABI compatible. Despite always having the same size and alignment, they are now also acknowledged as equivalent in function call ABI.

For debugging, the function any::type_name::() has been available since Rust 1.38 to provide a string description of the type T. However, this requires an explicit type parameter, which can be challenging to specify, particularly for unnameable types like closures or opaque return types. To address this, Rust 1.76 introduces type_name_of_val(&T), which allows users to obtain a descriptive name from any reference to a type.

The Rust 1.76 release also includes stabilized APIs, additional changes to Rust, Cargo, and Clippy, as well as various bug fixes.