> For those that assert Rust changes too much, I would submit the simple question "Why?" to them.
There was a blog post a couple days ago that made the complaint. Not linking because even the author felt it was too easily misread. From my understanding, the crux of the complaint was that it is hard to "keep up" with Rust. I think the idea is similar to the complaints made here about Javascript frameworks and friends. This is where the current blog post comes in, trying to quantify things to see how much justification there is to the complaint.
Personally, I don't think Rust is changing too much but it can easily be perceived that way and we can do stuff to help that perception.
One goal of Editions was to provide a rolled up release announcement to catch everyone up. The current blog post calls out how feature announcements are different between releases and editions. So I feel there is something we can be doing better about Editions. Maybe we should always schedule them, even if there are divides where code breaks. This would build trust in the wider community that if they don't need something specific, they can watch the Edition releases from a distance.
Another thought I had is that we can do a better job classifying changes. The current post talks about major, medium, and minor. My framing is from C++: pervasive vs library features. Right or wrong, some complain about complex C++ features and it gets excused as a feature the average developer can ignore because it is more targeted at the type of people who write boost libraries. We can be a lot clearer in the Rust community with what role a feature fills. Is it for a niche? What niche? How do we let people know if they should care or not?
So to be clear, I wanted to write this post for a long time. That post did spur me to finally write this, but it is not intended to be a “rebuttal.” I don’t think you can rebut subjective experience.
This is an attempt to figure out why that experience was had. I suspect that library and ecosystem breakage contributes to this feeling much more than the core distribution, so this is the first step towards that. I don’t yet have a methodology to quantify ecosystem breakage...
It could be an artifact of my interest areas, but all of the code I've worked on in rust and their dependent libs only work on rust nightly. The rust feature areas that I run into are
- Function/closure serde
- Futures/Async
- WASM
I'd be curious if part of the instability complaint is related to a problem of averages, the "average" program shouldn't be experiencing much change - but the average developer spends most of their time writing a non-average program, and will run into a stability issue related to some library/language feature.
There was a blog post a couple days ago that made the complaint. Not linking because even the author felt it was too easily misread. From my understanding, the crux of the complaint was that it is hard to "keep up" with Rust. I think the idea is similar to the complaints made here about Javascript frameworks and friends. This is where the current blog post comes in, trying to quantify things to see how much justification there is to the complaint.
Personally, I don't think Rust is changing too much but it can easily be perceived that way and we can do stuff to help that perception.
One goal of Editions was to provide a rolled up release announcement to catch everyone up. The current blog post calls out how feature announcements are different between releases and editions. So I feel there is something we can be doing better about Editions. Maybe we should always schedule them, even if there are divides where code breaks. This would build trust in the wider community that if they don't need something specific, they can watch the Edition releases from a distance.
Another thought I had is that we can do a better job classifying changes. The current post talks about major, medium, and minor. My framing is from C++: pervasive vs library features. Right or wrong, some complain about complex C++ features and it gets excused as a feature the average developer can ignore because it is more targeted at the type of people who write boost libraries. We can be a lot clearer in the Rust community with what role a feature fills. Is it for a niche? What niche? How do we let people know if they should care or not?