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The lifecycle of a feature, and where to look for updates

Rust Internals [Unofficial] March 30, 2026
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blonk:

From a high level, what's the process a feature goes through before it gets stabilized?

rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org

Stabilizing language features - Rust Compiler Development Guide

A guide to developing the Rust compiler (rustc)

std-dev-guide.rust-lang.org

Stabilizing a feature - Standard library developers Guide

Guide for standard library developers

blonk:

From what I gathered, features start out as RFC's. If the RFC is accepted, someone may implement the feature on nightly. At some point a tracking issue for the feature is created. Once the feature has baked for a while it can enter a FCP (who requests this, and who determines if it is ready for FCP?). Once it passes its FCP, it can be nominated for stabilization, where it will first reach the beta channel, and if that doesn't uncover any problems there it will reach stable.

  • An FCP is associated with some particular proposed action , such as merging an RFC, merging a stabilization PR, or just approving stabilization without having an exact PR yet. The FCP is requested by some project member, who specifies which teams' members should approve by checking their checkboxes, and the actual final comment period starts when sufficient boxes are checked.
  • The important part of the process that you haven’t mentioned is the stabilization report. This is a document which describes what is being stabilized (which may not be identical to the RFC) and presents evidence that that the feature is ready for stabilization.

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