Functions in binary files need to have unique names, so Rust needs to decide what to call its functions and statics. This format needs to be standardized so that debuggers and profilers can recover the full names (e.g. alloc::vec::Vec instead of just Vec). About a month ago, Rust switched to symbol mangling v0 on nightly. The linked announcement describes some benefits of the new scheme compared to the previous ad-hoc hack: Mangled names of generic functions now include generic parameters. There are almost no opaque hashes, meaning that it’s easier to make a hypothetical alternative Rust compiler produce identical mangled names. Mangled names no longer include characters like $ and., which some platforms don’t support. That’s pretty interesting, but not very deep. I want to highlight some non-obious details that weren’t mentioned in the post.