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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Rust is a great language for devs. They love it and how developer centric everything about it is.

But for end users on Debian trying to compile rust stuff is a nightmare. They do breaking changes in the compiler (rustc) every 3 months. This is not a joke or exaggeration. It's entirely inappropriate to use such a rapidly changing language in anything that matters because users on a non-rolling distro, LIKE DEBIAN, will NOT be able to compile software written for it's constantly moving bleeding edge.

This is an anti-user move to ease developer experience. Very par for the course for modern software.

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> They do breaking changes in the compiler (rustc) every 3 months. This is not a joke or exaggeration.

That is, in fact, a gross exaggeration. Breaking changes to rustc are extremely rare.

Since when do Debian users need to compile APT themselves?

Rust has stability guarantees. As long as you don't update version of your binary/library new compiler versions can compile for that version and you can even interlink different editions so I really don't understand this argument. C++ modules had a proposal for something similar but it did not pass. It would also fix so many horrible backward compatible things haunts the language as a whole.

Debian still has its policies which means your use-case shouldn't be affected by this.

The rustc version will be fixed for compaibility at every release and all rust dependencies must be ported to apts.

In the debian context, the burden imposed by rust churn and "cargo hell" falls on debian package maintainers.

I wouldn't see it that way.

First, Debian is not a distro where users have to compile their software. The packages contain binaries, the compilation is already done. The instability of Rust would not affect users in any way.

And second, as a developer, I never had a more unpleasant language to work with than Rust. The borrow checker back then was abysmal. Rust is not about developer happiness - Ruby is - but its memory safety makes it a useful option in specific situation. But you can be sure that many developers will avoid it like a plague - and together with the breakage and long compile times that's probably why moves like the one dictated here are so controversial.

> The instability of Rust would not affect users in any way.

Sure it would. Suppose a rust-based package has a security bug. Upstream has fixed it, but that fix depends on some new rust language feature that the frozen version of rust in Debian doesn't have yet.

Then the responsible Debian maintainer would backport that fix, as they have done in other languages for decades. Really, that's not user facing. It's a possible hassle for the maintainers and developers, which might be bad enough, but not a problem for users.

rustc stable is continually updated yes. But surely any given release of debian targets a specific version of the toolchain. What's the issue?

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