Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

GP is actually the second post in a week I've seen where someone mentions tracking rust changes, but rust has been 1.0 for a while now. Have there actually any backwards incompatible changes since 1.0, or are people really complaining about a problem that's been fixed for close to six months and even then was specific to beta versions?



There haven't been backwards-incompatible changes in practice, no.

That is to say: there have been technically backwards-incompatible changes, but every compiler and language, including those of C++ and Java, make technically backwards-incompatible changes in point releases (e.g. defining new functions in the libraries and modifying undefined behavior). Rust doesn't make changes that violate the stability guarantee. It goes further than that, in fact—any change that is not breaking according to the public guidelines but is thought possibly breaking in practice is tested against crates.io and feedback is solicited from those who have any private crates that might be affected to make sure it doesn't break them either.

(Unfortunately this policy is often misunderstood—for example, it's been claimed that Rust will make breaking changes as long as they don't break anything on crates.io, which is very much not an accurate description of it.)


Due to its erratic development and the much-delayed release of Rust 1.0, I fear that many people have associated Rust with frequent breaking changes, even if that is no longer the case. It's much like the "Java is slow" fallacy; it may have been true in Java's very early days, but it hasn't been the case for many, many years. Yet the misconception still persists, even to this day. This is the sort of taint that a language will find very hard to shake. The "Rust suffers from breaking changes" misconception is very ingrained in the minds of many programmers now.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: