This is one of my few big gripes with Rust too, but it should be pointed out that it's dynamic linking with other Rust code that isn't really supported. Dynamic linking with e.g. C libraries is a breeze.

Part of the discipline of writing C++ and C libraries is writing around a stable interface, that you can link against. In C++ that means using the pImpl pattern.

Which is, of course, the actual gripe we're discussing. The lack of dynamic linking is just a consequence.

This has happened and will absolutely happen again. Just being "memory safe" will not prevent protocol errors, bad IVs, preventing timing attacks, or the other subtle things involved when doing cryptography on the wider internet.

There's a huge list of tradeoffs between dynamic and static linking, and Rust is betting that in today's world, with modern tooling, internet availability, hardware speeds, and memory size, the benefits of static linking outweigh the costs. I guess time will tell

But- traditionally Linux has really leaned into the opposite approach, so it'll be interesting to see how that dissonance plays out, and whether one or both is forced to compromise, as Rust gets more embedded in the Linux ecosystem

As a Rust fan who subscribes to the classical Linux distro model (and even exclusively gets his Rust crates from there), I disagree. What you suggest comes with a cost, namely having to accept software in constant flux. To me, that cost in unacceptably big.

I write a bit more about this gripe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32925491

(Of course the problem is technically hard, or possibly unsolvable, so I don't blame the Rust folks for its existence.)

I did for work as well and in my case I do not want to touch it again for quite a while. Cargo is a terrible system with all kinds of hidden and possible broken dependencies you introduce and everything depends highly on the version of rust you use. It's not even close to mature enough to consider using except for test projects. It doesn't fix programmer errors despite every rust user trying to convince me otherwise that all imported crates are perfect.

I like the idea of the language somewhat but the entire ecosystem ruins it for me.

I've encountered none of this. Of course Cargo is going to have broken libs, it's just a package repo like npm, pypi (+ pip), etc.. The differences between "editions" is pretty large, but I haven't seen much reason to not use the latest release in most cases. The tooling out there is very good at supporting multiple toolchains simultaneously (though, not in the same project, necessarily).

> It doesn't fix programmer errors despite every rust user trying to convince me otherwise

No engineer who knows what they're talking about will ever say this. You're either spewing lies or are believing the words of people who have no idea what they're talking about, neither of which are good. Rust helps prevent a specific class of memory errors that are very common in C (and to a lesser extent, C++). It still gives you the `unsafe` escape hatch that lets you do almost anything you can do in C.

> It's not even close to mature enough to consider using except for test projects.

Our production hard-realtime control system begs to differ.

Can you give a concrete example of this?