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Comment by zibzab | Hacker News Reader

I have Steves book on paperback. Haven't had time to read it all and given the rate things are moving now I am afraid that some of it could be outdated.

As a developer, what I really want to hear is that Rust 2022 will be basically Rust 2021 with some bug fixes and performance improvements.

Let's hope we get there next year.

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Isn't that the goal of the Rust editions¹ that are released roughly once every three years? Rust had a 2015, 2018, and now a 2021 edition, so if that pattern is followed you can probably expect a new edition in 2024.

1: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/appendix-05-editions.html

The goal is not every three years. It's whenever people feel like it, but there's been discussion about formalising it to every three years

Hence the 'roughly' and 'probably'.

Stable Rust 2022 will include all of Stable Rust 2021, just with some more bug fixes, performance improvements and features. If anything from Rust 2021 becomes outdated then that happens because new features or syntax allow a much better way to do the same thing, not because the old thing no longer works.

That happens to most actively used languages. C# has seen some major evolutions in recent years and is 22 years old now, Java is 26 years old and has some major changes compared to what it was 7 years ago, and you can no longer discuss C++ (37 years old) without mentioning C++11 along the way.

Java today looks nothing like Java 5 however it's largely backwards compatible. I hope that Rust isn't afraid of making larger changes to stay relevant. Java 8 is what brought a lot of people back after looking at more functional jvm languages such as Scala

The jump from Java 8 (or earlier) to Java 11 (or later) is quite big though, and non-trivial software is not likely to work without at least updating dependencies and fixing some issues.

To me that's still better than no changes at all. I think the change to 8 was the biggest, after that they are manageable.

Is there any indication that Rust is not the new C++ in terms of language and ecosystem complexity? I just can't bring myself to learn languages like C++ and C# because they are changing at such rapid and complex paces, versus other languages like F#, Elixir, Clojure that are essentially feature complete. I'd like to learn Rust, but it just seems like a huge time investment.

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