However, many popular or important libraries like Serde or Rocket require the use of nightly. I recall the article a very short while ago on the front page that noted how Rust has effectively diverged into two languages, stable and nightly.
- Rocket is an amazing example of innovation, but it's currently just an experimentation.
- Serde works on stable for a long time but they experimented a more ergonomic version on nightly. They iterated upon it with Rust developers to create a new and well thought stable API which will land in the next version of Rust (macro 1.1 in february).
Rocket is likely to follow Serde's path during 2017 and will eventually work on stable in 2018. Building a great langage takes time ;)
Rocket just came out; I think it's an extremely interesting library, but https://crates.io/crates/rocket shows that it's been downloaded 618 times. It hasn't exactly taken the world by storm yet. I think it shows great potential though! But it's not a good case of showing that the Rust ecosystem largely depends on nightly.
The article you refer to contained a number of factual errors.
> my barrier to entry was anything harder than pacman -S rust cargo
Today, that also wouldn't be the case: "rustup update nightly" and "rustup run nightly cargo build" or whatever, with extra stuff to automatically switch per directory.
These "popular or important libraries" are nice use cases what you might be able to do with Rust in future. But relying on them right now and using them in production is not really a good idea.