"Is Rust a great fit for this project?" I get this question quite frequently so I think it's time to write down my thoughts if it can avoid you some painful and costly mistakes. Short answer: no. Coming from someone who wrote a successful book about Rust (Black Hat Rust)
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 maintain a long-term Rust + Node.js project, and the Node side is the painful one.
Node makes backwards-incompatible changes, and doesn’t have anything like the editions to keep old packages working. I can end up with some dependencies working only up to Node vX, and some other deps needing at least Node v(X+1).
That's an issue with almost the entire js ecosystem. I'm part of a project that has rather high security standards, so we have to keep everything updated. The Java side is almost trivial, update some version number, let the tests run and you're fine. The js side is a constant battle against incompatibilities, weird changes for no reason and simply tons of vulnerabilities.
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 maintain a long-term Rust + Node.js project, and the Node side is the painful one.
Node makes backwards-incompatible changes, and doesn’t have anything like the editions to keep old packages working. I can end up with some dependencies working only up to Node vX, and some other deps needing at least Node v(X+1).
That's an issue with almost the entire js ecosystem. I'm part of a project that has rather high security standards, so we have to keep everything updated. The Java side is almost trivial, update some version number, let the tests run and you're fine. The js side is a constant battle against incompatibilities, weird changes for no reason and simply tons of vulnerabilities.