Author: Stephan Sokolow
Created at: 2025-11-18 09:33
Number: 76
Clean content: On the other hand, rust occasionally introduces breaking changes outside of editions, for example I don’t think it’s fair to call Rust out for that specifically, given that it’s not a Rust-specific problem and that, as demonstrated in places like graydon2’s retrobootstrapping rust for some reason , my prior mention of which got spilled into the GitHub Gist because “New users can’t…”, "Modern clang and gcc won’t compile the LLVM used back then (C++ has changed too much – and I tried several CXXFLAGS=-std=c++NN variants!) Modern gcc won’t even compile the gcc used back then (apparently C as well!) Modern ocaml won’t compile rustboot (ditto) While I don’t have numbers, given that Rust’s regression suite became a bottleneck on development before Microsoft started donating Azure time, and that they have Crater (a bot for testing proposed changes against slices of the public crate registry up to and including “all of it”), I suspect Rust introduces breaking changes less than C and C++ do.
