4 ms·

I wish they'd break their current backwards compat. promises to fix some accidental complexity that has been introduced. Let legacy langs provide this kind of m

• cercatrova 4y ago
  It's a systems language so they're not gonna break BC. Although if there's a really great feature that comes out that requires BC breaking, then they should do so.
• tialaramex 4y ago
  It's not worth it. For example, it seems as though "Word".contains(char::is_ascii_lowercase) should work, because after all "Word".contains(char::is_lowercase) works and char::is_ascii_lowercase exists and does what you expect, the same but for ASCII only. However, for compatibility reasons char::is_lowercase takes a char, while char::is_ascii_lowercase takes a reference to a char, and so you can't just pass it to contains() and will need to write a closure to pass to contains to do ASCII instead. Writing the closure is ugly, but it's nowhere close to how awful a compatibility break would be so even a million things like this (and so far maybe I can think of a dozen) aren't worth it.
• brundolf 4y ago
  They have the Editions mechanism for unavoidable breaking changes, but their target market is people who care a whole lot about stability and maintainability, so it wouldn't make any sense for them to jettison that design goal.
  • SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
    Unfortunately the Editions system (as nice as it is) only works for the language, not for the standard or core libraries. It's possible to create such a system (similar to glibc symbol versioning), but AFIAK Rust doesn't currently have one.