this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Rust
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I know it's clickbait and all, but I can't really let their comments about "decay" go without saying anything.
I spent a weekend updating a Python project after updating the OS. Fuck Python's release methodology.
Yeah, Rust has a lot of releases, but they're all backwards compatible. I'm pretty sure a modern Rust compiler can compile any historic Rust program. Meanwhile every "minor" Python release has backwards incompatible changes and there's no guarantee of backwards compatibility at all. And that's without even bringing up the big major bump from 2 to 3 which... Was not handled well.
Honestly, if there's any language that people should be angry at for "decaying", it should be Python. Hell, even C and C++ have got this right.
I'm of course only one single anecdotal sample, but the release cadence has probably been the least of my problems. My experience is that it's fine to not update for quite some time. I have a crate with 1.60 (released about one and a half years ago) as MSRV, which means I run unit tests with that version, as well as stable, beta and nightly. The only pressure to upgrade is that some dependencies are starting to move on. Not that the newer compilers reject my code, not even anything deprecated.
Also, small, frequent releases usually takes away a lot of the drama around upgrading, in my experience. Not the opposite. A handful of changes are easier to deal with than a whole boatload. Both for the one releasing and for the users.