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I dont't think "half" is accurate, at least not anymore. A lot of things have moved from Nightly to Stable compatibility with stabilization of async, for exampl

I dont't think "half" is accurate, at least not anymore. A lot of things have moved from Nightly to Stable compatibility with stabilization of async, for example. Rocket builds on stable now, while for a long time it didn't. I'd like to see the actual percentage but AFAIK it would take some analysis. Crates.io shows 86417 total crates, searching for "stable" shows 3346 and "nightly" shows 2527... So that's not a good heuristic, probably.

rdsubhas 4y ago
Parent is saying the proportion is very high. It's not the exact number that matters. Even if one dependency your project uses needs nightly, then your entire project has to use nightly.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Less than 20% of devs use nightly. About a third of the devs who use nightly do it because of a dependency. 6-7% of Rust devs is a far cry from the “half” claimed by GP. https://github.com/rust-lang/surveys/raw/main/surveys/2021-annual-survey/2021-annual-survey-summary.pdf https://github.com/rust-lang/surveys/raw/main/surveys/2021-a...
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > Less than 20% of devs use nightly. You tried to make that sound like few Rust developers use nightly, but the same survey you linked to states that, while 7449 said they use the latest stable version for local development, 3333 said they use nightly, with 2853of them using the latest nightly and 481 using a specific version of nightly. All in all, the ratio of Rust developers targeting nightly releases or betas represents something in between a third and a quarter of the whole developer community. That's a lot of people in the Rust community delivering code targeting unstable and unmaintainable releases.
    - nindalf 4y ago
      > unmaintainable releases How did you come to this conclusion? Seems like it must be working for them, because most of them are using nightly out of choice. Plus it’s a service to the community. Their everyday testing helps make the stable releases better. Imagine if no one used nightly - that would be much worse.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is true, but you'd have to show that those nightly dependencies are relatively central to the Rust dependency graph (i.e., that lots of other things depend on them). To the best of my knowledge, that's not really the case (the really central dependencies in the Rust ecosystem are things like serde, libc, anyhow, etc. that all use the stable compiler). In my experience writing Rust professionally (including making heavy use of dependencies), I've only needed the nightly compiler once. And that was for our own code, not an external dependency.
steveklabnik 4y ago
It’s impossible to deep link into a PDF, but the raw survey data from last year is out: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/06/21/survey-2021-report.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/06/21/survey-202... It shows that the vast majority of people use latest stable. A decent chunk also use nightly, and the reason why “a crate dependency I need requires it” is pretty far down the list of reasons. Oh and a pet theory: the way you feel about this is correlated with the kind of work you do. I’d you’re writing an OS, you probably use nightly still, and so your dependencies probably do too. But if you’re higher up the stack, where unsafe is less common and the appropriate language features are more filled out, you probably never use nightly. This makes talking past people unfortunately easy to do.) (n.b. I’m glad they released the raw data, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to share this, because it wasn’t included in the blog post this year. I brought this up before publishing but my advice was ignored, oh well!)
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  I believe many browser-embedded PDF readers now support `page` fragments [1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/surveys/main/surveys/2021-annual-survey/2021-annual-survey-summary.pdf#page=15 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/surveys/main/sur... [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8118#page-4 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8118#page-4
  - steveklabnik 4y ago
    Oh fun! Thanks.
- simlevesque 4y ago
  Back in the days, before deep links... we'd just say the page number.

rdsubhas 4y ago

Parent is saying the proportion is very high. It's not the exact number that matters. Even if one dependency your project uses needs nightly, then your entire project has to use nightly.

nindalf 4y ago
Less than 20% of devs use nightly. About a third of the devs who use nightly do it because of a dependency. 6-7% of Rust devs is a far cry from the “half” claimed by GP. https://github.com/rust-lang/surveys/raw/main/surveys/2021-annual-survey/2021-annual-survey-summary.pdf https://github.com/rust-lang/surveys/raw/main/surveys/2021-a...
- arinlen 4y ago
  > Less than 20% of devs use nightly. You tried to make that sound like few Rust developers use nightly, but the same survey you linked to states that, while 7449 said they use the latest stable version for local development, 3333 said they use nightly, with 2853of them using the latest nightly and 481 using a specific version of nightly. All in all, the ratio of Rust developers targeting nightly releases or betas represents something in between a third and a quarter of the whole developer community. That's a lot of people in the Rust community delivering code targeting unstable and unmaintainable releases.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    > unmaintainable releases How did you come to this conclusion? Seems like it must be working for them, because most of them are using nightly out of choice. Plus it’s a service to the community. Their everyday testing helps make the stable releases better. Imagine if no one used nightly - that would be much worse.
woodruffw 4y ago
This is true, but you'd have to show that those nightly dependencies are relatively central to the Rust dependency graph (i.e., that lots of other things depend on them). To the best of my knowledge, that's not really the case (the really central dependencies in the Rust ecosystem are things like serde, libc, anyhow, etc. that all use the stable compiler). In my experience writing Rust professionally (including making heavy use of dependencies), I've only needed the nightly compiler once. And that was for our own code, not an external dependency.

steveklabnik 4y ago

It’s impossible to deep link into a PDF, but the raw survey data from last year is out: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/06/21/survey-2021-report.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/06/21/survey-202... It shows that the vast majority of people use latest stable. A decent chunk also use nightly, and the reason why “a crate dependency I need requires it” is pretty far down the list of reasons. Oh and a pet theory: the way you feel about this is correlated with the kind of work you do. I’d you’re writing an OS, you probably use nightly still, and so your dependencies probably do too. But if you’re higher up the stack, where unsafe is less common and the appropriate language features are more filled out, you probably never use nightly. This makes talking past people unfortunately easy to do.) (n.b. I’m glad they released the raw data, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to share this, because it wasn’t included in the blog post this year. I brought this up before publishing but my advice was ignored, oh well!)

lifthrasiir 4y ago
I believe many browser-embedded PDF readers now support `page` fragments [1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/surveys/main/surveys/2021-annual-survey/2021-annual-survey-summary.pdf#page=15 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/surveys/main/sur... [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8118#page-4 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8118#page-4
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  Oh fun! Thanks.
simlevesque 4y ago
Back in the days, before deep links... we'd just say the page number.