For the record, I take issue with the "almost a decade" label, development on Rust didn't start in earnest until 2010 at the earliest. :P It's about as misleading as saying that Go is 40 years old just because its commit graph goes back that far (https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors).

It depends on how you define "in earnest". Graydon started in 2006, which is a decade, though obviously it was very slow at first. My "almost" is an almost because of those personal project years. YMMV of course :P

The 4 commits before 2008 are pretty clearly not development on Go in any sense, they appear to be Brian Kernighan playing with the syntax and styling for a C "hello world" program: https://github.com/golang/go/commits/master?page=810

No one would say those commits show he was working on Go as a "personal project" during that time.

And I guarantee that none of the Rust commits from before 2011 survive to this day, because the compiler was rewritten from scratch in 2011. :P A different argument could say that Go dates back to 1995, because Go is essentially an evolution of Rob Pike's language Limbo.

So maybe you know why it's called 'rust'? I can't find any reference to it. Such a horrible name for a new programming language.

There's no one reason. One is the "rust" group of fungi. Another is that Rust isn't cutting edge; it uses ideas that have been around a while. And so on.

Will that talk be available online at some point?

I hope so. I gave it at FOSDEM in 2015, only intending to give it one time, and then they lost all of the video from the keynote track :( So I'm giving it again there to hopefully get it on the record.

That was a really good talk, one of the highlights of that FOSDEM for me.

Thanks so much! I was so sad when they lost the recording :(

This is one thing that's a little annoying to me. I know if I develop a Rust app today I can't leave it alone or it will decay horribly.

> This is one thing that's a little annoying to me. I know if I develop a Rust app today I can't leave it alone or it will decay horribly.

No, it won't. Rust has been stable since 1.0, as the article itself mentions.

Good news for you: this is a complete misconception. Rust has been stable for a year. With a minor caveat for actual bugs in the language, your code will compile on all Rust 1.X compilers from now until the end of time. Upgrading Rust versions has been a breeze.

You're overstating the stability guarantees. The Rust project has formulated it as “hassle-free upgrades” which seems to imply that small, simple edits may be necessary when upgrading to a new Rust version.

That's only for changes that are important, though: we don't make unnecessary changes.

Agree. It's important to underscore what was promised and what was not. Otherwise you might get the impression that a promise was broken (when it was not).

That was true prior to last year's 1.0 being released, but since then code no longer breaks, (in any major ways anyway, there's been some soundness fixes for the good of the language's future). Also, the Rust teams runs any potentially breaking changes against the crates at crates.io and they even sent fixes to existing crates in the past.

That's gotten much better since 1.0. Prior to 1.0, you needed to revise your Rust program about once a week so it would compile. Now the language has settled, but the libraries are still churning.

One of the big advantages of Go is that it comes with a coherent set of libraries from a single source (Google) that do most of the things you'd want to do on a server. Rust is more like Python; many people write libraries, many of which overlap and some of which work.

The advantages of having a distributed ecosystem vs. having a monolithic standard library is an extremely polarized topic, and I don't want to start that debate.

But I do want to emphasize that Rust libraries follow semver, and the lock features of Cargo mean that your builds are always reproducible and you upgrade only when you want to. Your code will never stop compiling one day just because some library "churned".

"Rust is more like Python; many people write libraries, many of which overlap and some of which work."

Odd comparison, Python actually has quite a comprehensive, well used standard library, which usually gives you enough to get going.

Using NodeJS as an example would've made more sense, where most libraries/modules are user written.

That should not be true. 1.0 meant that we stopped breaking things on a daily basis, if your code runs on stable today, it should run on stable tomorrow, modulo any soundness fixes (of which we have had two or three this year, which were all trivial to update).

If it is true, please file bugs. We do our best not to break people's stuff, going to pretty extreme lengths compared to many other ecosystems.

and occasional other breaking compiler bug fixes that are not really soundness fixes.