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rustdebacletime | 4 months ago

Your post strongly reinforces Rust's reputation as a language whose language designers are willing to break compatibility on a whim. If Rust proponents argue like this, what breakage will not be forced upon Rust users in the future?

Your post itself reinforces the OP's claim.

Edit: Seriously. At this point, it seems clear that the culture around Rust, especially driven by proponents like you, indirectly have a negative effect on both Rust software, and software security & quality overall, as seen by the bug discussed in the OP. Without your kind of post, would Ubuntu have felt less pressured to make technical management decisions that allowed for the above bug?

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aw1621107|4 months ago

> Your post strongly reinforces Rust's reputation as a language whose language designers are willing to break compatibility on a whim.

> Your post itself reinforces the OP's claim.

Again, I think it might be worth elaborating precisely what you think "on a whim" means. To me (and I would hope anyone else with a reasonable command of English), making a bad decision is not the same thing as making a decision on a whim, and you have provided no reason to believe the described change falls under the latter category instead of the former.

rustdebacletime|4 months ago

This new post you have made again reinforces the general notion that, yes, closer to "on a whim" than many like, the Rust community is willing to break backwards compatibility. It reflects extremely poorly on the Rust community in some people's eyes that you and other proponents appear to not only be unwilling to admit the issues, like the above issue that caused some people a lot of pain, but even directly talk around the issues.

In C and C++ land, if gcc (as a thought experiment) tried breaking backwards compatibility by changing the language, people would be flabbergasted, complain that gcc made a dialect, and switch to Clang or MSVC or fork gcc. But for Rust, Rust developers just have to suck it up if rustc breaks backwards compatibility. Like Dtolnay's comment in the Github issue I linked indicates. If and once gccrs gets running, that might change.

Though I am beginning to worry, for the specification for Rust gotten from Ferrocene might be both incomplete and basically fake, and that might cause rustc and gccrs to more easily risk becoming separate dialects of Rust, which would be horrible for Rust, and since there should preferably be more viable options in my opinion of systems languages, arguably horrible for the software ecosystem as well. I hope that there are plans for robust ways of preventing dialects of Rust.