On the one hand it's not hugely thrilling for the headline features of a new release to be improvements to doc tooling and a stabilized trait impl but on the other hand it's good to see the language settling down and maturing.
The 1.49 release will have a new tier 1 target (aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu) as well as apple silicon as a tier 2 target. The 1.50 release will have min const generics as well as stable backtraces.
As the releases are every 6 weeks, an individual one might seem small. But over time they add up.
Note though that I do consider the rustdoc improvements to be major. Previously I wasn't bothering with directly linking to referenced items because you had to figure out html names. Now it's very easy and I plan to write more links.
These may be major changes for devs, but for beginners who want to learn Rust without it changing under them all the time, these are not major changes anymore. Which is a great thing!
There have been releases where ARM (maybe I was using armv7 rather than aarch64 then, but I'm on aarch64 now) was totally broken, and now I know that won't happen on 1.49 or beyond.
Min const generics...I'm not sure I'll find much use for it until const_evaluatable_checked happens, but I'm glad to see progress.
Stable backtraces will mean I can stop using the deprecated failure crate without giving up my quality diagnostics.
There are big changes under the hood. And those regularly make HN front page. Like the recent Cranelift codegen backend to help with the coding-compiling cycle time.
Similarly there's regularly ~350 PRs merged each week into rust. (The libification and chalkification is ongoing, which is the next-gen solver for the type/trait system, plus at the same time some refactor of the compiler to make it more like a usable library, so rust-analyzer can use it to provide more immediate/incremental feedback during development.)
The 1.49 release will have a new tier 1 target (aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu) as well as apple silicon as a tier 2 target. The 1.50 release will have min const generics as well as stable backtraces.
As the releases are every 6 weeks, an individual one might seem small. But over time they add up.
Note though that I do consider the rustdoc improvements to be major. Previously I wasn't bothering with directly linking to referenced items because you had to figure out html names. Now it's very easy and I plan to write more links.