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First of all, let's hope Rust development slows down in the long term as it matures. I think it is already starting as dependence on nightly is less of a thing

First of all, let's hope Rust development slows down in the long term as it matures. I think it is already starting as dependence on nightly is less of a thing than it used to be. Secondly, Rust has strong backwards compatibility guarantees and you can pin your code to a certain edition. Thirdly, one big use case for gcc would be compiling the Linux kernel that might contain Rust in the future. So it would be enough to support the subset of Rust that gets actually used in the kernel. I would imagine they would be very conservative about which features get used and adopt at a much slower speed.

cesarb 4y ago
> So it would be enough to support the subset of Rust that gets actually used in the kernel. I would imagine they would be very conservative about which features get used and adopt at a much slower speed. For now, it's the opposite: the kernel needs several Rust features which aren't even stable yet (https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2 https://github.com/Rust-for-Linux/linux/issues/2). But I agree that, after Rust has been in use in the kernel for a while (and it no longer needs any unstable features), the kernel developers are going to be somewhat conservative about which features are required (but not about which features are used; they probably will use a lot of conditional compilation, like they already do for gcc/clang, see the compiler-*.h files).