[jnbiche]

>At the same time it [Rust] does not have the ecosystem

Try watching new projects pop up at Rust CI [0] for a few days. With the possible exception of Node (which is not even a PL), I've never seen a language ecosystem grow this vast, and I'm a PL afficionado.

I think in a year's time, the question of Rust's stability and ecosystem will be entirely moot. It's a tough wait meanwhile, but I'm still investing the time in learning Rust (and it's a significant investment).

0. http://www.rust-ci.org/projects/

[Pacabel]

Is Rust CI really the best evidence to use in this case?

When I last looked at it, probably 40% to 50% of the projects listed had builds that were in the "failing" or "error" statuses.

That indicates that one or more of at least a few things are happening:

1. The Rust language and its standard libraries are changing at a pace that results in previously-compiling code needing to be modified before it will compile again with a newer version of the language/implementation, perhaps a very short time after the code was initially written.

2. The Rust compiler or other tooling is crashing or failing in some way while compiling these projects.

3. The projects themselves aren't being maintained on an ongoing basis.

4. The projects themselves were never building properly in the first place.

5. The projects' developers are targeting different versions of Rust (which probably means there will be interoperability problems for anyone trying to use them in a larger projects, especially when it comes to libraries).

And while there may be a lot of these projects, I've never found the quality to be very good. Many of them are extremely limited or incomplete. Many of them are little more than casual experimentation. Many of them are only developed by a single person, who often has appeared to have lost interest.

Those factors are disconcerting, especially for somebody who wants to use Rust for serious product development. It does no good if there are hundreds of libraries available for use, but half of them don't even build, and the ones that do are very incomplete.

[jnbiche]

>Many of them are extremely limited or incomplete. Many of them are little more than casual experimentation. Many of them are only developed by a single person, who often has appeared to have lost interest.

Yes, I completely agree, and this is an entirely normal part of the language ecosystem development cycle. Rust is at the tail end of the experimentation stage, and as it converges on 1.0, more people will undertake serious projects.

I'm not at all worried about the quality of Rust projects. I'm just happy to see so much enthusiasm. I have no doubt that all this enthusiasm will transfer into some powerful libraries as Rust continues to stabilize and reaches 1.0.

But yes, it's still to early to use Rust for production unless you're willing and able to write your own libraries.

Then again, the "batteries included" approach of Rust's standard library leaves not much to be desired outside of domain-specific libraries.