Comment by nindalf
2 months ago
The master branch of the Rust repo is built every night and distributed. That's a nightly build. Most people are on the stable release, which is updated every six weeks.
A minority use the nightly build for various reasons: a feature that hasn't reached stable yet, or because they want to help test the nightly releases and prevent bugs from reaching stable.
Is it a minority? Are there stats posted for this?
Only recently have I had some projects switching to stable after their required features stabilized.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/surveys/main/sur...
89.4% of users surveyed use stable. 31.1% use nightly, but there's overlap there (e.g. I use nightly to try out new things but don't build things that depend on nightly). Only 11.5% of people say they use a crate that requires it.
> Only recently have I had some projects switching to stable after their required features stabilized.
While this used to be very common back then (in 2016-18 many things where progressively stabilized and you had cornerstone libraries switching to stable at almost every release) it hasn't been so for the past 5 years.
Rust gets way less “exciting” new features nowadays, as the language has settled a lot (there are still moving parts, but they are the minority not the norm).