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Comment by wc- | Hacker News Reader

This looks very nice. I've been following rust and go for a while now and I finally have a small service to write that would be a good fit for either language so I'm going to try both.

I noticed one of the repo's more recent issues was caused by a change upstream. The upstream rust devs seem very accessible, but how often do you encounter these kinds of breaking changes. Acknowledging that rust is pre-1.0, is there any way to stay up to date on these kinds of changes before they hit your app so you aren't blind sided?

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We spent a lot of time talking with rust devs on #rust, which is full of extremely helpful, extremely nice people who help you as much as possible.

Usually we woke up in the morning to everything broken due to changes in the nightly, but it's pretty easy to grep for [breaking change] and work from there. Most changes take moments to fix.

We see these changes every other day or so, but they're usually small syntax changes, and the community's pretty quick to update.

A good way to stay up-to-date is always This Week In Rust, or /r/rust.

I know rust is pre-1.0 but wow that's a lot more breaking changes than I expected...

The rate of change slowed, but then, as we get closer to 1.0, the rate of change has sped back up again. We need to break as many things as possible as soon as possible, so that we can give the community some time to try it out before we christen a 1.0 release. Does that make sense?

Seems to me like you need at least a year before beginning to think about releasing 1.0.

Naw. The language itself is getting smaller and smaller over time. Most breaking changes these days (though not all!) are in libraries, which have individual stability markers, and the stability of the standard library doesn't block 1.0.

A year is a very, very, very long time in software. Why do you suggest that long? I'm curious.

Possibly so of you break something in a bad way, you have time to find out, break it again, and then make sure that change is a good one.

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