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Not necessarily. The way that new features fit together with existing features has a big impact on how useful and beneficial adding those features are. In C++,

Not necessarily. The way that new features fit together with existing features has a big impact on how useful and beneficial adding those features are. In C++, using modern style is .a nicer experience, but at the cost of having to stay away from any code pre-C++11. This is not because C++ designers are bad, but rather because they have more cruft due to existing for longer. Time will tell if Rust will go down that same road, but right now new features fit with the rest of the language and are usually extensions to things that already exist but that weren't allowed in places.

ajross 7y ago
But... again... the contention of the linked article, and one I share, is that these new features don't "fit with the rest of the language" and keeping up with them represents needless cognitive churn. I mean, sure, that's an opinion thing, and obviously you don't share it. But to me, watching from outside the core rust community, it sure seems like exactly the same thing that happened to C++.
- dralley 7y ago
  It really, really, really needs to be stated that the thing that triggered this whole discussion is not a "new feature", it is not even an RFC, it is a blog post written by a prolific Rust developer who also turned the idea into a library, and wanted to share the merits of the idea. The fact that it's controversial and "doesn't fit with the rest of the language" means it will very likely never become an RFC in its current state, much less become part of the language. There is no need for the author to make constant changes to his code. It will continue compiling just fine. Moreover, new "editions" come along with nice documentation on what changed and tooling to automatically fixup code, and are totally opt-in. You can simply wait for a new edition to come along to update your code -- or not, it doesn't ultimately matter that much.

ajross 7y ago

But... again... the contention of the linked article, and one I share, is that these new features don't "fit with the rest of the language" and keeping up with them represents needless cognitive churn. I mean, sure, that's an opinion thing, and obviously you don't share it. But to me, watching from outside the core rust community, it sure seems like exactly the same thing that happened to C++.

dralley 7y ago
It really, really, really needs to be stated that the thing that triggered this whole discussion is not a "new feature", it is not even an RFC, it is a blog post written by a prolific Rust developer who also turned the idea into a library, and wanted to share the merits of the idea. The fact that it's controversial and "doesn't fit with the rest of the language" means it will very likely never become an RFC in its current state, much less become part of the language. There is no need for the author to make constant changes to his code. It will continue compiling just fine. Moreover, new "editions" come along with nice documentation on what changed and tooling to automatically fixup code, and are totally opt-in. You can simply wait for a new edition to come along to update your code -- or not, it doesn't ultimately matter that much.