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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

It still feels too early to say that. Every time I look at Rust, it still feels incredibly different from the last time I looked into it. I'm excited about this language, and I hope they get it out of the gate and popularized before Microsoft's counterpart is ready... but it's so far from solidified right now that I'm worried they might be rushing into 1.0

Of course, nobody wants their language to be forever a toy instead of something actually used, so I get the the pressure to settle things.

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> Every time I look at Rust, it still feels incredibly different from the last time I looked into it.

I think this is a good sign, as far as stabilization goes. It means they're frontloading all the experimentation, rather than saying "maybe next version."

But when does the front-loaded experimentation phase end? When is it "good enough" to get a stable, usable release out there into the wild? It's easy to say "Before the end of 2014." but I think we potential users need to start seeing something more definite. While Rust isn't at a Perl 6 type situation just yet, it creeps closer ever day. There are a lot of us who want to use Rust today, and we can settle for some imperfections. What I don't think we can settle for is a language that remains in an alpha or beta state after 5 years, or even 10 years.

- Pacabel

> but I think we potential users need to start seeing something more definite.

Why? A potential user isn't owed anything; Mozilla hasn't done a marketing push to capture you, gotten you to sign up for a developer program, or offered Rust up as the solution to any given problem you have. They haven't promised you anything. They're just tinkering with Rust like you'd tinker with a custom car in your garage. Also, unlike Perl 6, there's nothing that's laying fallow in an increasingly-desperate way while they work on Rust.

On the other hand, a programming language is forever. I'd rather have a programming language a decade late, that I can use for 40 years, than a programming language right now that gets outmoded after four.

there's nothing that's laying fallow in an increasingly-desperate way while they work on Rust.

Oh, don't worry. There's plenty of activity in Perl and the CPAN that's not waiting on Rakudo.

Mozilla owe it to themselves to get as many users of Rust as possible, especially if they intend to use it seriously at some point for their own software. Only languages with strong adoption truly survive and provide an ecosystem rich with effective libraries and development tools necessary for them to flourish.

While programming languages may "last forever", their viability for real software development is very impacted by their adoption. Languages with limited or minimal adoption will not be usable for anything beyond trivial software systems. Just look at the Modulas, Lisp, and even Haskell.

- Pacabel

> It's easy to say "Before the end of 2014." but I think we potential users need to start seeing something more definite.

This is precisely what the current push towards 1.0 is. You can look at the priority tags on the issue tracker.

> What I don't think we can settle for is a language that remains in an alpha or beta state after 5 years, or even 10 years.

Rust is currently making all efforts not to be that.

Precisely.

The core language hasn't changed very much at all in the last few months, it's mostly been libraries that have changed. I've been writing "Rust for Rubyists" for the past year, and I started with 0.5. I need smaller and smaller changes each time, and most of them are regex-able.

Agreed. The people on Rust's IRC channel are very helpful but are flabbergasted if you are using anything other than HEAD (even the most recent official release is considered ancient history). I'm glad they're willing to make big changes to get everything right, but it seems like things still need a little time to settle before freezing things.

When is the target for 1.0? That wasn't mentioned in the linked message.

Before the end of 2014.

> Every time I look at Rust, it still feels incredibly different from the last time I looked into it.

It feels that way to me, too, although in fairness, the amount of changes (i.e. the number of different kinds of edits, as opposed to the number of any one change) has actually been fairly small as I've been updating code to go with the "official" releases.

On the other hand, I would like to see some reasonable period of time with a "feature freeze" before 1.0.

> "popularized before Microsoft's counterpart is ready"

Do you have any information on this or is it just conjecture that MS would attempt such a noble task?

I've only skimmed Rust, but it looks exactly like what I'd want, from trying to do some "systems" type coding in F#. I'm still unconvinced the CLR isn't up to the job - with some annotations for allocation handling, a lot of the performance gap could be closed.

See http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4862.

Hmm interesting. The first thing they mention is GC. IMO that's very solvable with manual intervention, and probably not too hard to solve with tooling. A call a simple as String.Split can require allocating multiple objects on the heap just to make the call. (An array to string objects.) There's no reason this couldn't be stack-allocated. Similarly, there's probably lots of code that'd benefit from a pool allocation, like say, processing an HTTP request, where GC can be done just by freeing the pool.

There will be a microsoft counterpart. There is a google counterpart. There is D. There is Parasail. There is Rust. There is Ada.

All will fight out.... C++ will thrive under the patronage of its father, C

Some patronage. I'm not sure any coding community is as hostile towards another as C's is to C++.

I don't think 1.0 is close, so we still have time to change the language. However, when the day does come, we'll have the guarantee.

I think it's just a restatement of policy that's already on the website.

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