this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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I think the author is underestimating the long term issues with Rust. Its already the case the language and ecosystem is so much in flux that code that's been written today has been made obsolete by a language feature in the latest nightly build. Rust is risking of going the C++ way: have some many freatures bolted on that even as an experienced developer, you can checkout a random project on Github and discover a new language feature. That is not a good situation for projects that require longevity, especially in a professional setting. When working on software in a professional setting, you will often have cases where you revisit code bases that you have not touched for half a year. You will have a hard enough time to stitch your thoughts on how your business cases worked back together. You really don't need syntax patterns that you haven't seen in half a year to get on your way.
Using Rust for projects with a long lifespan requires something from developers that we are especially bad at: the ability to be disciplined when presented with new, shiny things. Go on the other hand has this by design, which makes it admittedly boring but also relieves you of such burdens so you can focus more on getting things done.
I mean couldnt you say that about any language? There's lots of old C code that's obsoleted by features in C11. There's lots of stuff written in python today that's obsoleted by stuff in the 3.13 alpha. It's just kinda how things go.
Doesnt the edition system prevent this from being too big of an issue anyway?
Sure you could say it about “any language,” but I think you’re skipping a lot of nuance with your examples: python has notoriously had a long transition from 2 -> 3. C is 40+ years old, and the semantics and idioms of the language aren’t changing from month to month.
I think the parent comment is making the point that the pace of change and evolving idioms/features of Rust means that code you write today may need to be updated in a far shorter timespan than the typical timeline for working code (a few months, rather than several years). The bitrot is just a lot faster right now than other languages.
Updating the language doesn't mean the code will be broken. It just might just not be the best way to do thst anymore. Like a lot of traits I have written over the years got similar ones in std now and I could switch to them, but my old code still works.