[nickik]

I started to write a VM in Rust and every weekend, when I managed to get some time for work it would usually no longer work and the reason for it had to be found in some mailing list or commit message.

I had to stop doing that and rewrote it in C.

'Fortunately' we had some other problems as well but Im still hopeful that Rust is the language you want to use for this in the future.

[swsieber]

I think it is. Especially if you keep your code in a public repo, any breaking changes (probably just tweaks as opposed to huge features that break stuff), will probably have a pr filed via cargo.

From what I understand, the rust team has scripts that crawls the repos and compiles everything looking for usages of some feature being used that's going to break in the next release, and they will issue a pull request to fix those.

[steveklabnik]

It's more subtle than that. For most things, we guarantee no breakage at all, and we do runs like that (though not against github, but against crates.io) to verify we haven't accidentally broken something.

For stuff that we are allowed to change, but might cause breakage, we will try to find stuff and send PRs.

But the default and our intention is zero breakage as much as possible, not just "we'll fix it for you". We'd guarantee absolutely none but it's not actually possible in a statically typed language, so we have to go with "effectively none."

[charlieflowers]

Automatically filed pull requests against my github repo would be amazing!

Actually, you all looking through crates and sending PR's is pretty impressive in itself.

[hyperpape]

I'm writing a VM as well, albeit a very simple one. I started sometime last fall and have never had a problematic upgrade.

I also got a new computer during that period and rustup has made setup really nice.

[nickik]

We were working mostly in the months before 1.0 so it was right in the time of rapid changes.