[cesarb]

> Still, as long as something is a compile-time error, I don't care about having to update my code when I choose to upgrade compilers.

It's not just your code; it could be the code of any of your dependencies (or their dependencies, recursively). Besides, the Rust team does intend to keep older code compiling unchanged on newer releases of the Rust compiler, unless the breakage is caused by fixing a soundness hole.

The best example of a non-exhaustive enum, in my opinion, would be std::io::ErrorKind (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/enum.ErrorKind.html). Several Rust releases ago, I added a new variant to that enum (the last one, UnexpectedEof, used by std::io::Read::read_exact - notice how that variant comes after "Other", which used to be the last one). If that enum were not non-exhaustive (non-exhaustive enums already existed since Rust 1.0, though using a doc-hidden trick instead of formal compiler support), I would not have been able to add that new variant, since it would risk breaking anything which matched on every variant of that enum.