> I hear this story a lot about Rust, and it makes me wary of the language.

Why wary? The whole point of experimental nightly is that you can try out new exciting features which are not stabilised yet. Sometimes they will be changed before a full release and you have to deal with it.

But if you stay with stable releases, code keeps working.

It’s the bit where it has to be a nightly but not a too new nightly that gives heebiejeebies.

Kind of reminds of some godawful government websites which had very finicky requirements in which their ActiveX components would run: precise Internet Explorer builds, with these updates but NOT WITH THESE updates, and god forbid you update your Windows XP past SP1.

Nightly is totally unstable. Features get added, and might get removed if the team decides they're not a good idea. So programs that want to use such an experimental feature might only work for a certain few versions of Nightly, because Nightly only guarantees the stability of features that have been released to Stable.

That's why it's strongly recommended not to use Nightly to write your programs: they'll almost certainly break, and since Nightly gets released every 24 hours they might break daily. If you don't have the time to fix things every day, you shouldn't be using the unstable features!

I've looked at Rust a few times, and every time I installed the stable release, but as soon as I wanted to actually do something, I realise that the library or feature I wanted to use was not actually available in stable.

At least at the time (a year or so ago perhaps) it was not possible to actually use stable for regular development. Has this changed now?

In our 2018 survey, 56% of people used nightly. In 2019, it was down to 30%.

This question is always multiple choice, so people who use Rust a lot may choose both nightly and stable. The vast majority of my projects target stable, with my operating system ones being the exception that use nightly.

Rewriting it has nothing to do with it being in Rust. The reality is that I don't have a lot of free time, but I really wanted to get the project into a functioning state (even if it sucked). So I took some shortcuts a couple years ago in order to get it fully functioning (more or less) in a short amount of time. I would have taken those same shortcuts in any language.