[pcwalton]

> What, if anything, is being done to try to inform these people that the situation has changed, to encourage them to try Rust again? What's being done to restore Rust's reputation?

A lot? For example, "Stability as a Deliverable", which was here on HN: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html

I'm not sorry for opening up the language during its early development. The alternatives would have been to produce a deeply flawed language or to keep the language secret. Both of these are far worse than a few ignorant comments.

[M2Ys4U]

There are still plenty of crates that say "you need to be using nightly!".

That put me off starting to develop something in Rust right now, unfortunately, because I'm a huge fan of the way Rust was developed and its core ideals.

[pcwalton]

We can't force people to use the stable version of Rust. But it does exist. And we're working on bringing the most popular nightly features to stable as soon as possible.

In any case, even if you're using nightly your code won't break nearly as much as it did pre-1.0. We use nightly in Servo and we've been through dozens of Rust upgrades that sailed through without a hitch--and we have 150+ dependencies.

[M2Ys4U]

Oh absolutely - people are inevitably going to want to play with the new shiny (for various reasons, improved functionality and novelty being the two biggest), and Rust is still relatively young so the crate ecosystem is, while not small, not yet comprehensive.

This means that while Rust-the-language is stable, the ecosystem around it isn't quite yet. That's perfectly fine and it's nobody's fault, least of all the people developing the language. But it is one of the barriers to me picking it up right now, though.

[Cshelton]

That's more about encouraging crate developers to make their package work on stable. There are crates that are made to take advantage of nightly features, but I believe many of those label them as "beta", "unstable", "only works in nightly".