Comment by Ygg2
4 months ago
> Unfortunately, it is a failing of many projects in the Rust sphere that they spend quite a lot longer in 0.x than other projects
Yes. Because it makes a promise about backwards compatibility.
> Rust language and library features themselves often spend years in nightly before making it to a release build.
So did Java's. And I Rust probably has a fraction of its budget.
In defense of long nightly feature more than once, stabilizing some feature like negative impl and never types early would have caused huge backwards breaking changes.
> You can also always go from 1.0 to 2.0 if you want to make breaking changes.
Yeah, just like Python!
And split the community and double your maintenance burden. Or just pretend 2.0 is 1.1 and have the downstream enjoy the pain of migration.
> And split the community and double your maintenance burden.
If you choose to support 1.0 sure. But you don't have to. Overall I find that the Rust community is way too leery of going to 1.0. It doesn't have to be as big a burden as they make it out to be, that is something that comes down to how you handle it.
> If you choose to support 1.0 sure.
If you choose not to, then people wait for x.0 where x approaches infinity. I.e. they lose confidence in your crates/modules/libraries.
I mean, a big part of why I don't 1.x my OSS projects (not just Rust) is that I don't consider them finished yet.
Godot launched 0.1 in February 2014 and got to 1.0 in December 2014.
The distance in time between the launches of Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 was 8 years (April 2014 to April 2022). Unreal Engine 5 development started in May 2020 and had an early access release in May 2021.
Bevy launched 0.1 in 2020 and is at 0.16 now in 2025. 5 years later and no 1.0 in sight.
If you want people to use your OSS projects (maybe you don't), you have to accept that perfect is the enemy of good.
At this point, regulators and legislators are trying to force people to use the Rust ecosystem - if you want a non-GC language that is "memory safe," it's pretty much the de facto choice. It is long past time for the ecosystem to grow up.
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