Yanking crates does not get rid of their code; you can still depend on them in your crates, you just can't upload those crates to crates.io. Editions are not l

Yanking crates does not get rid of their code; you can still depend on them in your crates, you just can't upload those crates to crates.io. Editions are not lock-in; the entire point of the edition system is to allow the version of Rust that exists in 2032 to compile every prior edition in the same project at once, and only single crates at a time have to be 2030 edition. Before making any change that could possibly be breaking, the change is tested on every single crate on crates.io, as well as on a great many GitHub repos that aren't, in order to make sure there aren't any regressions (referred to as a crater run). You are right that the problems you describe would be problems if Rust was implemented the way you're implying. That is why Rust was not implemented the way you're implying, but rather implemented specifically to avoid these problems.