I will certainly concede the second, but we put a _lot_ of effort into ensuring that Rust is stable. Things have changed a lot since the pre-1.0 days.
The instability of the pre-1.0 days left a very bad impression on many people who tried Rust then. They came to know Rust as a compile-today-but-not-tomorrow kind of language. What, if anything, is being done to try to inform these people that the situation has changed, to encourage them to try Rust again? What's being done to restore Rust's reputation?
A lot? For example, "Stability as a Deliverable", which was here on HN: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
I'm not sorry for opening up the language during its early development. The alternatives would have been to produce a deeply flawed language or to keep the language secret. Both of these are far worse than a few ignorant comments.
That put me off starting to develop something in Rust right now, unfortunately, because I'm a huge fan of the way Rust was developed and its core ideals.
In any case, even if you're using nightly your code won't break nearly as much as it did pre-1.0. We use nightly in Servo and we've been through dozens of Rust upgrades that sailed through without a hitch--and we have 150+ dependencies.
This means that while Rust-the-language is stable, the ecosystem around it isn't quite yet. That's perfectly fine and it's nobody's fault, least of all the people developing the language. But it is one of the barriers to me picking it up right now, though.
The programming community of people who actually write real things and create production software, I highly doubt any of those people are the people you are referring to and thus Rust should be doing nothing to restore its reputation with those people, as they are ignorant and/or highly incompetent, and I hope they never write a piece of code that makes it into production.
We try to be fairly vocal about the things we're doing here, but of course, it can be tough to get the word out. While some people may not know things have changed, a lot of people also do.
Some examples of things we do to ensure stability:
* The RFC process requires lots of discussion before major change happens, to ensure we can do things in a compatible way.
* We run a tool, "crater", both on PRs that we are worried might cause issues, and just in general. This tool compiles all of the open source Rust code on crates.io with the new revision, and reports problems. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot.
* For that matter, we don't merge any code ourselves; bors manages a fleet of 30ish machines that test every commit with our full test suite.
* We recently added three significant crates (and their dependencies, which last I checked was around 80ish crates in total?) to be part of our test suite, so we know that they build properly on every commit.
Releasing something called 1.0.
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
EDIT: As you can see from the number of responses you got, this matters a lot to the Rust community :-)
Rust has been _extremely_ vocal about its stability guarantees. Not sure what else can be done here.