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> Rust is 10 years old. Rust didn't have any pick up in adoption (understandably) until 1.0 in May 2015, as a consequence of breakneck speed changes before the

> Rust is 10 years old. Rust didn't have any pick up in adoption (understandably) until 1.0 in May 2015, as a consequence of breakneck speed changes before then as the developers understandably wanted freedom to break things until then. Also, 1.0 wasn't a "feature complete" release, it was a "we promise not to break your current code" release. It was an MVP. I would say it took a few releases before it was useful enough without having to rely on nightly features. All this to say is that saying that it is 10 years old, when code from 6 years ago would be completely alien and not compilable today, is misleading by omission. > It needs a more comprehensive standard lib. Reasonable people can disagree. There's a difference between having a fat stdlib that has the same cadence as the compiler, and having a "blessed" crate ecosystem that can evolve on its own. Doing it that way can let people update either their compiler or their dependencies independently of each other (modulo minimum version bumps on libraries) and opens the door to more aggressive deprecation schedules that the stdlib can never consider. Your points about the actual popularity of the language are very true: Rust is niche now and will likely continue to be so for a while, but I don't think it will remain niche.

jiggawatts 6y ago
> deprecation schedules that the stdlib can never consider. This is utter fantasy. You can have a standard library that doesn't get deprecated often, or no "standard" libraries at all. Oh, I mean, sure, you can call it a "blessed crate ecosystem", but that's just a label. A name. You can call it Bob's Best Bits, or the Stevens Standard Set, or whatever you want, but inevitably it'll be either: a) Difficult to change because so many other libraries depend on it, because it is the established standard. b) Easy to change because it's not the established standard and hence nobody cares if it breaks the handful of things that depend on it. Everyone wants option (c), where an established standard is magically easy to change. But there's no such thing. Putting libraries outside the "std" namespace doesn't help in any way.
- estebank 6y ago
  In Rust you can have multiple versions of the same crate in your project. This let's you update you your dependencies almost whenever you want, even if their transitive dependencies require different versions of the same crate. You can't have multiple versions of the stdlib (the way that things are set up today). Some crates re-export typed from their dependencies, and to use those you have to match in the right crate version. This is an anti-pattern, but it happens.

jiggawatts 6y ago

> deprecation schedules that the stdlib can never consider. This is utter fantasy. You can have a standard library that doesn't get deprecated often, or no "standard" libraries at all. Oh, I mean, sure, you can call it a "blessed crate ecosystem", but that's just a label. A name. You can call it Bob's Best Bits, or the Stevens Standard Set, or whatever you want, but inevitably it'll be either: a) Difficult to change because so many other libraries depend on it, because it is the established standard. b) Easy to change because it's not the established standard and hence nobody cares if it breaks the handful of things that depend on it. Everyone wants option (c), where an established standard is magically easy to change. But there's no such thing. Putting libraries outside the "std" namespace doesn't help in any way.

estebank 6y ago
In Rust you can have multiple versions of the same crate in your project. This let's you update you your dependencies almost whenever you want, even if their transitive dependencies require different versions of the same crate. You can't have multiple versions of the stdlib (the way that things are set up today). Some crates re-export typed from their dependencies, and to use those you have to match in the right crate version. This is an anti-pattern, but it happens.