Seems like (from that Reddit thread) a lot of the things are in progress in the nightlies. I wonder if that means the nightlies are holding Rust back (because it relieves the pressure to actually ship features for use by normal developers).
Trust me, being available only on nightly does not reduce pressure :)
Most of our users use stable, and want to stick to stable. There's just some use-cases that need features we haven't finished designing yet, such is life.
Might very well be; I have the luxury of not looking a nightlies at all :) it's just been frustrating how often problem reports get a response that the solutions are in the nightlies. I suppose it's possible that it's more meant as "it's being worked on" rather than "this is not a real issue, stop complaining", but the acknowledgement that it's actually an issue for people using release builds seem to be missing whenever nightlies are brought up in these sorts of responses.
Contrast this with other languages (C++, Python, Ruby, Go) where I have no idea what features are under development until they hit a stable release. Compare to JavaScript, where stable releases are so slow people built transpilers ;)
This could also be because I'm interested enough in Rust to occasionally land on the first-party discussion forums, of course (probably helped by how open the language development is). I'd say it's also young, except that it now has a release number much larger than 1.0 and doesn't really get to claim that anymore.
> I suppose it's possible that it's more meant as "it's being worked on" rather than "this is not a real issue, stop complaining", but the acknowledgement that it's actually an issue for people using release builds seem to be missing whenever nightlies are brought up in these sorts of responses.
I think that's the right assumption, because it's an acknowledgement that the issue actively being worked on to the degree that they have at least a partial solution implemented, as opposed to the "someone is working on that" response language developers sometimes give which usually predates that and could mean someone is reading literature and surveying the field and no code has actually been written.
As you note, because development is so open, nightlies are easily accessible, so people might incorrectly infer that they are being recommended to use them, or that the problem is solved. I think what the devs are attempting to communicate is that it's close, and if you want you can test it out to see what it's like and give feedback. This might be a case of similar groups with slightly different context (lang devs / lang users) interpret a statement differently. From what I've seen, the Rust devs see fairly responsive to communication issues when pointed out, so maybe this will result in some change (or perhaps they are acutely aware of the issue already and instituted changes have not shown benefit, at least yet).
Yeah, I appreciate that nightlies are an option. It's just frustrating how often that option is trotted out without the caveat that it isn't a real solution. (This is again basically reacting to a particular Reddit comment linked above, but those sorts of comments are things that are more memorable.)
Actually interacting with rust-related people, whatever their capacity (developer, user, etc.) tend to go pretty well; it's just that once in a while a random comment shows up that seems dismissive of actual problems people are reporting.
You're probably right though, it's just that people have different contexts and I'm reading more into things than intended. Again, rust development is extremely open (which is great) and these things just tend to not be visible for other languages, rather than not happening.
> Yup, that's absolutely it. I'm not sure of a good, succinct way to imply the former rather than the later...
Personally, a sentence saying something to that effect (i.e. showing that it's understood that it doesn't immediately hello just yet) would be sufficient. It would probably get tiring every time nightlies are mentioned, though, but it means people (like me) who randomly land on a thread would know that the problems are acknowledged.
> We do releases every six weeks, so while it is in some sense, it's also just going to be higher than other languages.
Right, but the problem is that the rest of the world has expectations on those numbers (e.g. x.0 is probably buggy, >0.x is a thing external people are expected to be able to use). The particular minor version number doesn't matter as much. That ship has sailed (and probably circumnavigated the world a few times) though.
The biggest problem is probably that I'm comparing it to golang, which was the last 1.x language I learned, and that had a more complete standard library by 1.0. Again, likely the effect of the much more open development model (no baking behind closed doors).
I think that was a minority of the points; the majority of the points was in the space of the author not realizing something was possible in Rust.
Out of these points they were all for features which are steadily on their way to stable (or future things which are actively being worked on right now).
Very few folks use nightly -- many use it locally for improved developer tooling, but mostly everyone wants their crate to work on stable.
