This partially implements the feature staging described in the
[release channel RFC][rc]. It does not yet fully conform to the RFC as
written, but does accomplish its goals sufficiently for the 1.0 alpha
release.
It has three primary user-visible effects:
* On the nightly channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of unstable APIs generates a warning.
* On the beta channel, use of feature gates generates a warning.
Code that does not trigger these warnings is considered 'stable',
modulo pre-1.0 bugs.
Disabling the warnings for unstable APIs continues to be done in the
existing (i.e. old) style, via `#[allow(...)]`, not that specified in
the RFC. I deem this marginally acceptable since any code that must do
this is not using the stable dialect of Rust.
Use of feature gates is itself gated with the new 'unstable_features'
lint, on nightly set to 'allow', and on beta 'warn'.
The attribute scheme used here corresponds to an older version of the
RFC, with the `#[staged_api]` crate attribute toggling the staging
behavior of the stability attributes, but the user impact is only
in-tree so I'm not concerned about having to make design changes later
(and I may ultimately prefer the scheme here after all, with the
`#[staged_api]` crate attribute).
Since the Rust codebase itself makes use of unstable features the
compiler and build system to a midly elaborate dance to allow it to
bootstrap while disobeying these lints (which would otherwise be
errors because Rust builds with `-D warnings`).
This patch includes one significant hack that causes a
regression. Because the `format_args!` macro emits calls to unstable
APIs it would trigger the lint. I added a hack to the lint to make it
not trigger, but this in turn causes arguments to `println!` not to be
checked for feature gates. I don't presently understand macro
expansion well enough to fix. This is bug #20661.
Closes#16678
[rc]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0507-release-channels.md
Uses the same approach as https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/17286 (and
subsequent changes making it more correct), where the visitor will skip any
pieces of the AST that are from "foreign code", where the spans don't line up,
indicating that that piece of code is due to a macro expansion.
If this breaks your code, read the error message to determine which feature
gate you should add to your crate, and bask in the knowledge that your code
won't mysteriously break should you try to use the 1.0 release.
Closes#18102
[breaking-change]
