[pornel]

It's a rehash of a bunch of old misconceptions. I thought we've buried these when people got actual experience with Rust.

The dumbest one is counting changelog lines. Have you even read them? These days most of them are "obscure libstd function is now allowed in const contexts".

The regular Rust releases include compiler improvements, libstd evolution, and build system tweaks. Nobody's saying C keeps changing because LLVM has a long changelog or CMake added a new feature.

[tialaramex]

I agree but more common than "Now allowed in const context" is "This new type/method/free function is now stabilized" e.g. in 1.95 they stabilized a bunch of "Atomic update" methods such as:

AtomicPtr::update which is a nicer way to write one of those "Get the pointer, do some stuff to calculate a new value from the old one, then try to swap its old value for the new one, if the pointer changed meanwhile repeat each time with the changed value until we succeed" stanzas some low-level people will have written a hundred times. This library feature does all that boring boilerplate for you, you just write that "calculate a new value" code as a lambda (or function, Rust doesn't mind) and you're done.

That's the sort of feature where if it didn't exist when you wrote your code, you go "That's nice" and move on, no change needed, but now that it does exist you might use it in future software you write. If you have a team writing Rust it probably makes sense to have somebody read these changelogs, but that's about it.

[saghm]

I tend the be the one on my team who reads them. I don't think I've ever had a coworker in close to seven years of writing Rust professionally that had trouble because they didn't read them. At most, sometimes I'll suggest using some function I remembered reading about to someone in a code review, and then they'll go "oh, cool!", and use it, and then they don't need to do anything else. Meanwhile, the times that there are useful changes under the hood, you get them in a few weeks instead of maybe some time later in the year or next year.

I don't understand at all how someone could plausibly argue that this is a problem in this context. At absolute most, you could argue against some of the downstream effects of the rapid release cycle (like how it reinforces the small standard library size; more surface area means potentially more bugs, and putting out an extra release to fix them when there are already releases so frequently is a hard sell, so it makes sense to keep things slim), but the article doesn't have anywhere close to that level of nuance in addressing the issue, so I'm skeptical that this is even something they've considered.