Rust 1.88 Released: More Control, Cleaner Builds, and Smarter Syntax

On June 26, 2025, the Rust team announced the release of version 1.88. This update includes contributions from 443 developers worldwide. Rust continues to evolve quickly—Rust 1.80 came out in July 2024, and the milestone Rust 2024 edition (1.85.0) was released in February 2025. In May 2025, version 1.87.0 marked the 10-year anniversary of Rust 1.0.

Rust remains focused on safe memory handling without relying on a garbage collector or a complex runtime. Instead, it uses compile-time checks to manage memory, ownership, lifetimes, and safe access. The Cargo toolchain supports dependency management, building, and package distribution through the crates.io repository.

 What’s New in Rust 1.88

Rust 1.88 introduces a number of useful features and changes across the language, Cargo, and Clippy:

• Naked Functions Support. Developers can now use #[unsafe(naked)] to define “naked functions” with no compiler-generated prologue or epilogue, giving them low-level control over assembly output.
• Chained let in Conditions. if and while statements now support chained let expressions using &&, making conditional logic more expressive.
• Cargo Cache Cleanup. Cargo now automatically runs garbage collection for its cache directory. Files downloaded from the internet and unused for over 90 days will be deleted to save space.
• Boolean Literals in cfg. The cfg predicate system now supports boolean literals, improving configuration options.
• Stabilized APIs & Platform Changes. Several APIs have been stabilized, and the i686-pc-windows-gnu target has been demoted to Tier-2.

Rust 1.88 continues the language’s mission of performance, safety, and reliability with meaningful updates for both low-level and everyday developers.