Re:Building a Rust Mentality
by mustache_kimono on Friday July 22, 2022 @11:07AM
(#32192720)
This also touches on a really important point -- all this takes place in a context. What is the context? One context -- sometimes there are exciting new features! Another context -- this issue is mostly about users who want to build your software from source (this isn't a problem for you, as such), but who don't want to download a new copy of the compiler to do that. Is this a large group of users, if you're not a library? I don't think so.
There's quite a gap between "Now arrays implement IntoIterator" (about a year ago, you can e.g. write for loops over an array) and "Termination is now stable" (May 2022, you can have custom exit code handling in your program)
I'm sure a few people were excited about Termination, but practically everybody uses IntoIterator and arrays. So of course they would want that feature.
As a Linux user I remember manually compiling 1.3.x back when odd numbered micro meant "Unstable" because 1.2 didn't have features I really cared about. Today I just run whatever kernel the OS installed. Are there important new Linux features in linux-next? Probably, maybe I will read about them in LWN and look forward to them, I'm definitely not going to bother compiling it by hand for any new feature I can imagine.