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by duped 490 days ago
> And no, curl|sh and/or rustup are not solutions.

I'm confused - you are frustrated that the official release channel of software that is used by almost all users of that software is "not a solution" because you want to use unofficial release channels that have outdated versions of the software that are much more rarely used?

1 comments

Correct. I avoid rust because it is a language where it's pretty much infeasible to have a compiler from your system repositories unless it's a rolling distro. Having some random application require updates so often (like a browser) is marginally acceptable if distasteful. But a compiler and toolchain that exists entirely outside my distro? No thanks.

What I am confused about is how everyone is pretending this is a normal software situation. It's vastly weird and different from most compilers and toolchains. It may be normal if you're coming from web dev but web dev is not normal and not a healthy ecosystem.

It's totally normal except for C/C++ toolchains on Linux. C/C++ compilers are managed this way on MacOS, Windows, and by most embedded toolchains.

Why don't you want your toolchain managed outside your distro? Don't you want your software to run outside your distro?

Longing for a more stable world doesn't sound very weird to me. Maybe core Rust development will slow down in the future.
I came over to Rust from C++ and I really don't want core Rust development to slowdown. The changes you see are mostly useful APIs in std.

Compare to C++, where using a new std API/type can take a literal decade and might not be backwards compatible on targets even once compiled.

Stability is only useful if it gets in the way of reliability and convenience. That's true in C/C++ because of the compilation and development model. In Rust those problems don't exist, so "stability" of std largely gets in the way.

Well, you're never going to have a stable world when you're constantly pulling in updates to your dependencies. In any language.

And if you stop updating those, you stop needing rustc updates.

Right, but in the rest of the world it's more common for the libraries to support a wider range of compiler and language versions. The culture as of yet of Rust, is that more libraries require the newest compiler.
But that wider range by itself means nothing. It only matters in the context of what it enables and how well it enables it.