On Thursday, 25 September 2014 at 13:49:00 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
I've recently used Rust a bit and the curse of D users as of
6-7 years ago reached me: most code I download online doesn't
compile for obscure reasons, it's nigh impossible to figure out
what the fix is from the compiler error message, searching
online finds outdated documentation that tells me the code
should work, and often it's random name changes (from_iterator
to from_iter and such, or names are moved from one namespace to
another).
That's more than a bit unfair. Rust's developers have made it
abundantly clear that things will keep changing until version
1.0. If you want to play with some Rust that's guaranteed to
work, go to
http://www.rust-ci.org
and find a bit code that interests you which isn't failing, and
then download the nightly. The docs on the Rust home page are
either for a fixed version (0.11.0) or the nightly. Let's wait
for a bit of time after 1.0 is out before you critique the
annoying changes; they deliberately are developing in the open to
get community input and avoid getting stuck with too many
mistakes (though it looks like they are stuck with C++ template
syntax, ugh!). So far, I haven't found it too hard to update
code, and they've been good at marking breaking changes as
breaking changes, which can be searched for with git.
In the case of D, the main D2 book was published 4 years ago and
that should correspond to Rust 1.0 or even later, since D already
had a D1 to shake out the mistakes and bad namings. That's gone
perfectly, with no code breakage between releases during those
four years, right?
