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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Hey hey, calm down a little.

I use rust a lot, and it’s been heavily geared towards nightly for a long time.

The whole rust nightly/beta/stable hasnt worked well, because (afaik) the beta usage is tiny and people tend to jump on nightly or stable. It’s only very recently any effort has been made to change this for the new edition.

...so, you know, the comment may not be entirely accurate, sure, but it’s our fault people have come away from rust feeling that way.

The OP is not at fault here, and definitely not, I think, willfully lying.

Take a deep breath; there’s no need for this sort of attitude, and frankly it reflects badly on the rest of us (rust users).

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Please don't post personal swipes like "calm down a little" and "take a deep breath", even if someone else is wrong or misbehaving.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Rust wouldn't be a better language if nightly were instantly made stable. Instead, we'd have a ton of half-baked features that we'd be supporting for eternity.

Rocket requiring nightly is unfortunate, and I wish it didn't, but aside from Rocket stable has been a good forcing function to get crate authors to not add nightly dependencies.

Anyway, from what I see, actix seems to get more buzz than Rocket these days, precisely because the former works on stable.

True, I’m not arguing that; but, for example, two days ago there was a big thread about using NLL to solve a problem.

It’s not like we’re past the nightly being the first toy people reach for to solve problems; that is still very much a thing.

You're getting pretty far away from the original claim though. Which widely used crates require nightly to take advantage of nll?

Some crates will always require nightly because there will always be some people that want to take advantage of the latest features. That's a good thing to a degree, because it encourages experimentation with said features before stabilizing them. This is completely different from implying that nightly Rust is required by a lot of popular crates, which just isn't true. Most people are productively using stable Rust.

wasn’t the entire wasm ecosystem on beta until 3 days ago?

/shrug

The OPs point about some/many/[??? numbers of] people not using stable isn’t that unreasonable imo...

> The whole rust nightly/beta/stable hasnt worked well, because (afaik) the beta usage is tiny and people tend to jump on nightly or stable. It’s only very recently any effort has been made to change this for the new edition.

My impression was that most people feel the Beta toolchain is doing its job just fine, because most projects that use CI include a Beta test run. I don't think the plan was ever to have people using Beta on the command line as their daily driver.

The recent regression soundness issues last release were indicative of people not using the beta.

Notice specially the last month or so of actively asking people to try the beta.

If it wasn’t a problem, that wouldn’t be happening.

Can you give an example of soundness regressions in the previous release? Neither the 1.29.1 release nor 1.29.2 are indicative of people not using the beta; the former concerned a potential security vulnerability in a stdlib API that had existed for several releases, and the latter concerned a runtime heisenbug that could neither be found by merely compiling with beta nor even reliably by running the code.

> Notice specially the last month or so of actively asking people to try the beta.

This is because for the last month the beta has represented the first release candidate for Rust 2018, which is more important than normal releases in all three of implementation scope, backwards compatibility concerns, and marketing potential.

Well, one of the major use cases for the beta channel is for the Rust teams to fix regressions before they hit stable.

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