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Comment by ferdowsi | Hacker News Reader

Needing to jump on a tech support chat server to a debug a language backwards compatibility issue seems another bug, not a feature.

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What? If you run into a bug, having people willing to help you out is absolutely a feature and to insinuate otherwise is absolutely ridiculous. If you personally prefer to deal with it on your own, then you're still free to do so.

So you're claiming that needing help to fix an issue in a language you don't at all know is bad? How is it supposed to work otherwise? In my opinion, the fact that you have an option of asking an expert in this situation is a good thing.

I don't want my tools to break from under me, and I don't want to be forced to call tech support needlessly. Do you love dealing with refrigerator repairs? Why should we love dealing with Rust repairs?

It's not needless if you've found an actual bug, i.e. if your refrigerator is actually broken. I too wish it was possible to get a refrigerator that never breaks or malfunctions or needs to be replaced. If you know how to make one of those, please start selling it, you'll probably get very rich.

Experiencing backwards compatibility breakages is not "finding a bug" it is the tool being broken from under you.

I don't have to prepare for the possibility of having live tech support open whenever I update the Go binary in my projects. Rust advocates should not try to suggest this is reasonable.

If you use highly unstable, nightly only, Rust features then experiencing breakage is almost a certainty. That's why they're highly unstable, nightly only, features.

I think the Go team would also appreciate it if you filed bugs after finding a legitimate regression.

A software bug is an error, flaw or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways.

If the Rust compiler developers intend to provide backwards compatibility, but accidentally make a change that breaks that, then that is absolutely 100% a bug. You are allowed to prefer that the software you use has minimal bugs, but you are deluding yourself if you think that the Go compiler (or essentially any other piece of software) is bug free.

Keep in mind, that Rust backwards compatibility don't extend to some cases. If an unsoundness error happens, future versions WILL break backwards compatibility.

This whole thread desperately needs more information about the actual error. Firefox doesn't use stable Rust (it enables experimental features), so from my viewpoint there is no bug here until more facts are on the table.

Part of the problem seems to be that Firefox goes out of its way to hide this use of unstable features.

Perhaps that makes this a Firefox bug, but given Firefox's historical relationship with Rust, that's not a good look for the Rust community either.

It also does not extend to unstable features, which Firefox (the program in question) uses. The whole post is quite ill conceived and makes me reconsider my general trust in the authors' output.

Exactly, who cares if "firefox engineers are in discord".

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