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The Rust apologists are numerous in these threads. Several people have told OP he should have reached out to ask the Rust community for help rather than writing

The Rust apologists are numerous in these threads. Several people have told OP he should have reached out to ask the Rust community for help rather than writing a “passive aggressive” blog post. Is pointing out an undesirable behavior of Rust passive aggressive? I had the same experience trying to use older versions of Rust or trying to use newer versions of rustc on older crates. It doesn’t “just” work. For many of us this coming from Go, this seems like a step backwards. I’m thankful OP had the courage to post this note about his experience. I’m also disappointed to see members of the Rust community to suggest its a failing on OP’s part that they were not able to get Firefox to build and that bringing up this difficulty is something OP was wrong to do.

michaelmrose 5y ago
He wrote a blog post about a language and tools that he doesn't personally use or understand that he was trying to use to stress test his system. From reading the responses it seems that he may have misunderstood Firefox specific issues as being rust issues by virtue of having insufficient understanding to disambiguate. Had he communicated he probably would have been able to derive this understanding easier from conversation thus the exhortation that he ought to have do so sees to be productive and correct. I don't think its apt to call the people critiquing the critique "apologists" when the entire original blog post seems to be misunderstanding on the part of the blogger. Posts that critique things the poster do not understand tend to themselves generate critical feedback which seems fairly measured to me.
zinekeller 5y ago
> I had the same experience trying to use older versions of Rust or trying to use newer versions of rustc on older crates. It doesn’t “just” work. For many of us this coming from Go, this seems like a step backwards. I have read the blogpost... and this isn't really the substance of the complaint? It is Mozilla's fault really to be honest, they should be sticking to a nightly if they want to use weird and non-standard features. I personally think the only similarly between yours and the authors' is the (supposed) unmet promises of backwards compatibility - guess what, I code in different languages (including Go) and I can see breakages regularly, mostly not due to breaking a "backwards compatible" promise but because the broken code has been always there, just not being enforced by the compiler. Specifically in Rust, the backwards compatibility promise wasn't Microsoft's "everything including undocumented features" backwards compatibility: it was only limited to documented features used properly. This can surprise people who relies on the Microsoft definition of backwards compatibility.
jhugo 5y ago
OP could have easily found out why FF failed to build on newer Rust, which is in fact due to its use of experimental/unstable features which it enables through a flag that is only supposed to be used for bootstrapping Rust. Because it effectively opts out of any stability guarantee, FF only builds on certain Rust versions. But instead of taking a moment to read and understand the error messages, or ask the community for help with understanding them, OP chose to publish and popularise a blog post without including the error messages (or any context that would help anyone to make up their own mind based on actual facts). Courage is not the word I would use.

michaelmrose 5y ago

He wrote a blog post about a language and tools that he doesn't personally use or understand that he was trying to use to stress test his system. From reading the responses it seems that he may have misunderstood Firefox specific issues as being rust issues by virtue of having insufficient understanding to disambiguate. Had he communicated he probably would have been able to derive this understanding easier from conversation thus the exhortation that he ought to have do so sees to be productive and correct. I don't think its apt to call the people critiquing the critique "apologists" when the entire original blog post seems to be misunderstanding on the part of the blogger. Posts that critique things the poster do not understand tend to themselves generate critical feedback which seems fairly measured to me.

zinekeller 5y ago

> I had the same experience trying to use older versions of Rust or trying to use newer versions of rustc on older crates. It doesn’t “just” work. For many of us this coming from Go, this seems like a step backwards. I have read the blogpost... and this isn't really the substance of the complaint? It is Mozilla's fault really to be honest, they should be sticking to a nightly if they want to use weird and non-standard features. I personally think the only similarly between yours and the authors' is the (supposed) unmet promises of backwards compatibility - guess what, I code in different languages (including Go) and I can see breakages regularly, mostly not due to breaking a "backwards compatible" promise but because the broken code has been always there, just not being enforced by the compiler. Specifically in Rust, the backwards compatibility promise wasn't Microsoft's "everything including undocumented features" backwards compatibility: it was only limited to documented features used properly. This can surprise people who relies on the Microsoft definition of backwards compatibility.

jhugo 5y ago

OP could have easily found out why FF failed to build on newer Rust, which is in fact due to its use of experimental/unstable features which it enables through a flag that is only supposed to be used for bootstrapping Rust. Because it effectively opts out of any stability guarantee, FF only builds on certain Rust versions. But instead of taking a moment to read and understand the error messages, or ask the community for help with understanding them, OP chose to publish and popularise a blog post without including the error messages (or any context that would help anyone to make up their own mind based on actual facts). Courage is not the word I would use.