> you can close it off 5 months in and then stabilise for a month.
This doesn't help. If a release happens every six months then regardless of what you do during the release cycle, you are faced with situations where someone has a work item just about ready to ship in release X, but not quite, and you face enormous pressure to ship it in release X rather than in release X+1 six months later. On the flip side if you do force it to slip to release X+1 then that's several months of users not having the benefit even though it's ready.
If you're releasing every six weeks, there isn't any such pressure. Less work is shipped prematurely, less work is shipped later than necessary, and developers are less stressed.
And it has been a game changer if you ask me, Jira tickets don't pile up in the test lane, testers don't have to do one big regression tests at the end of the sprint just to sure. Sometimes even making them work overtime just to be sure. The code area that introduced new bugs is way smaller and the bugs have become easier to trace down.
But they don't in Rust. My example of Min Const Generics is an example of this. Async-Await (developed by GP on this thread) was also delayed to give it more time to bake.
I urge you to look at the releases page (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md). Look at how few user facing changes are made with every release. This is a good thing! As long as you're ok with skipping these and the performance improvements, you can stay on an older release for basically forever. Most Rust libraries are conservative about their minimum supported Rust version (MSRV) so there isn't usually a push to upgrade at all.
If the OP wants a compiler and toolchain that only changes every six months, that's already available. He can stick with the same compiler for six months or even longer with 0 downsides.
Sure, but there's also things like how long will the current version be supported if there are security issues, or similar. People also want a version that will be supported with bug/security fixes for 6 or 12 months vs "Oh it's broken? Upgrade to head."
The most used enterprise OS, Windows, is rapid release too -- every 6 months, coincidentally! But there's a LTSB branch you can use. Java releases every 6 months too, and that hasn't halted enterprise adoption. Similarly with C#, not every team jumps to the latest language level just because it was released. Teams should pick language updates at a speed that suits them -- but hopefully not so slowly that moving to newer releases becomes difficult.
Similarly with Go. Why should it be any different with Rust? To the extent that enterprises are using the latter two in massive numbers. The key thing is, as others have noted, is stability and a lack of breaking changes.
Exactly when it comes to Java, even though there is now a 6 month release cadence, take a survey of which version most are using. Certainly every time I bring this up, someone pops up and says, "I'm using 11" or "10". But the vast majority of "enterprises" are at max, Java 8. And they'll remain on 8 until something forces them off of it. Enterprises by nature move at a glacial pace. So their reason for adopting Java is not because it's "moving fast".
I was replying to the parent poster, who said that moving fast is a roadblock to enterprise adoption. Whether enterprises adopt Java because it's moving fast is another question altogether. Certainly no one is deserting Java because of the decision to boost its release cadence.
> Enterprises by nature move at a glacial pace
I think it depends on the enterprise.[1]
Cyber-Security has changed the game for many enterprises very fundamentally. Well-run enterprises now patch more promptly than many consumers -- at least, certainly the consumers who don't auto-update. Well, unless they want a Maersk-like incident[2], or be infected by ransomware. Maersk's incident cost it $200M if you believe Forbes.
About slow JVM upgrades, a lot of that is a cost/benefit calculation or poor technical leadership. CIOs and COOs (or audit, for that matter) have no interest in which Java version you use. The only questions are: Is it secure? Does it make commercial sense?
For actively developed software, staying on a recent-ish Java isn't a problem (many good enterprises have adopted Devops in some shape and form -- just add a task to your CI server to test on the latest JRE) once your engineering team has crossed the Java 8-to-11 hump. If you do that, you get to not pay Oracle $$$ per desktop/server every year (or you could use Corretto etc, but most enterprises will choose to pay Oracle). Or you could simply upgrade for the productivity & JVM improvements.
Legacy products not in active development are another matter, but even there -- the cost of not getting security updates is too high nowadays, so you have to spend money to secure it -- and legacy software has other costs too[3]. So unless you're a developer working on a legacy app, or an app who's design is so poor that it's locked into Java 8, there's no reason you couldn't be on Java 11 soon and get on the rapid cadence train yourself thereafter. It's really about how nimble your team is.
Of course, you could be unfortunate enough to work in an enterprise that doesn't take cyber-security seriously, in which case YOLO.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873325
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/08/16/notpetya-...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/citibank-just-go...
if you work on safety/security critical systems upgrading the toolchain is considered like changing the tires on a moving vehicle. We have introduced and many weeks later discovered critical (and hard to trace) bugs simply by changing -O2 to -O3 in gcc that ended in sporadic crashes when cross-compiling for 1 specific platform. (which is a change much less severe than upgrading gcc itself) And I'd be surprised if upgrading the toolchain wouldn't potentially introduce similar hard to trace issues in rust.
My point is that just because the first 2 months after upgrade look like there were no required changes in code doesn't mean there are none. I see rust being used in very large companies for internal projects, test harnesses, and other glue/plumbing. And the places I know are really reluctant to go all the way in and substitute their ~30 years of experience with C/C++ with something that remains a constantly moving target. To be fair there are other reasons such as culture, and distribution of skills across the team that drive these decisions but my main point still holds (i think).
Sure, this happens regularly in C and C++ because large programs inevitably depend on undefined behaviour, and changing compiler versions, optimization levels and target platforms is allowed to change that behaviour.
For the last five years I've been writing 99% safe Rust code, which is designed to have no undefined behavior, and I think it's not a coincidence that I can't remember ever having a compiler update break code at runtime. Once in a long while a compiler update will fail to compile some existing code, but that's not a safety issue.
The idea that C and C++ compilers are somehow more stable across releases is a mirage. https://lwn.net/Articles/845691/ https://lwn.net/Articles/845775/
I mean, even with C, there is a very circumscribed subset that you use for "safety critical" applications.
2) People are banging on about Rust not being stable but the Rust Embedded guys DO lag for stability--so you can have stability if you choose. And Rust is by far the best language I have seen about being able to stay on old compiler versions and still use newer libraries.
3) I find crappy libraries to be the biggest threat to Rust's sustainability. There was a big "Gold Rush" mentality and a whole lot of unqualified people built a whole lot of crap libraries with no good way for someone to come along later and to flag "That's a crap library, please remove it from crates.io permanently".
This sounds more like undefined behavior in your codebase than a compiler error. I don't know Rust but I'm pretty sure the whole selling point is that you won't run into problems like this.
As an aside, the clang bug would also affect Rust if they used that type of optimization (assuming strict aliasing rules).
[0] https://lists.isocpp.org/std-discussion/2020/10/0882.php
No, this bug cannot affect rust, because rust wouldn't allow to pass into a function three mutable references pointing to the same object. It wouldn't even allow two, nor one mutable and one immutable. Either it pass one mutable reference, or any number of immutable.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
Anyway, Rust has found plenty of noalias bugs in clang, which is why it still doesn't compile with noalias optimizations turned on.
It absolutely happens, but less often than you would think.
Rust has a tool named "crater" which compiles and executing tests for every package uploaded to crates.io (and some which are just on github).
It's not perfect but supposedly it catches quite a lot of bugs.
> This psychological tinkering isn't helpful.
The former comment is thoughtfulness about the ways that a system of work influences contributors mindset and thereby project quality. Even if the specific conclusion was incorrect, the earnest attempt is necessary to project health. If you disagree, you probably want to short-sell Toyota stock.
I'm curious, what in there would make someone have to deal with the changes?
This psychological tinkering isn't helpful. People can push unfinished stuff in any situation. E.g. you can close it off 5 months in and then stabilise for a month.
I don't think the OP is having trouble learning. They're having trouble with the almost-monthly changes.