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Comment by mscottmcbee | Hacker News Reader

Rust looks very interesting to me, but seems to be in in a state of high flux. Does anyone have experience with sustained work in the language? How often are you hurt by the rate of change?

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It's not so much the rate of change, but maybe just how much stuff is missing that has to be supplemented by bringing in C libraries, which is totally OK. Rust is going to take a long time to mature, much longer than Go for example, because the project is maybe more ambitious and doesn't have a Rob Pike or a Brad Fitzgerald supporting it and a giant Google behind it. The risk is that it could flounder without critical support, but Mozilla seems to be committed to it. I hope it does well.

It was also announced at an earlier part of the maturation cycle than Go was, due to Mozilla's 'everything is all open source all the time' nature.

>Rust is going to take a long time to mature, much longer than Go for example, because the project is maybe more ambitious and doesn't have a Rob Pike or a Brad Fitzgerald supporting it and a giant Google behind it.

Plus, unlike Go, they go for an iterative refinement and design, and don't settle for the first BS implementation that comes to their mind.

Recently I tried to build a rust project (just to play a bit around with the language and the tool). The code was too new to build with the latest stable (0.7) but too old to build with the latest nightly. Servo (web rendering engine) even says which git version of rust to checkout to be able to build it.

Rust is at the moment not usable for productive code. They are still experimenting and changing things quite drastically. But I think that's a good thing. I'd rather wait another year for Rust and have a mature well-thought-out language. I've waited long enough for something like Rust I can wait a little longer.

It's probably going to be more than a year before Rust is ready for productive software at the current rate and given the breadth of what's missing. There is a lot of passionate activity so it will probably make it, hopefully maybe more in 3-5 years time.

It's still pre-alpha, don't use it if you don't want to be dealing with daily backwards-incompatible changes (mostly in the libraries), occasional language features being modified or removed, etc.

I think by 0.8 or 0.9 the language itself will be able to be unofficially backwards-compatible, but we'll see.

I have been fooling with it for a while, and yes, the rate of change is pretty painful. For example, there have been two significant changes to iterators recently: first the relatively minor change to (internal) iterator functions to return bool, allowing them to be nested, and then the complete revision to external iterators.

The libraries are also in a high state of flux, with stand-alone functions being replaced by trait methods and some functionality disappearing or being replaced.

http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2013/07/letterpress-cheating-in-...

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