Rust at 10
Rust turns 10 today, or at least it’s been 10 years since the 1.0 release. In this decade (and the near-decade of development before!) it has undergone growth and change I can barely comprehend the scale of. To say I’m surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement: I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved. It is deeply inspiring to have watched all that’s happened over that time and reflect on it from today’s vantage point.
While it’s tempting to talk about Rust’s journey in terms of the growth of “an idea” – perhaps starting from my amusing frustration with a broken elevator in 2006, as chronicled in this MIT technology review article – I think doing so misses the bigger picture.
In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure.
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Importantly: since all of this was done in the post-1.0 environment, every single change passed an exhaustive testsuite, and every release was regression-tested against a significant fraction of the public crate ecosystem, and with very few exceptions any change that broke existing code was rejected. As the 1.0 release announcement promised, Rust remained stable without stagnating. Existing code, in almost all cases, just kept humming along, like good infrastructure should.
Thank you to the myriad contributors who have worked on Rust, past and present. Here's to many more decades of Rust! 🎉
As part of RustWeek there was a fantastic celebration and I had the honor of giving some remarks, both as a long-time project member but also as representing Amazon as a sponsor. I decided to post those remarks here on the blog.
I’d instead like to reflect a bit on a comment I saw on the internet the other day:
[Rust is] not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, precisely because of the ease of refactors and speed of development that comes with the type system and borrow checker.
Patrick Walton, one of the earliest contributors to Rust, had this to say:
I never thought I’d live to see the day when someone would say this. The first 5 years of Rust were all “this is interesting for hobby projects but nobody will ever adopt this in industry”.
Kobzol (via Dominik Wagner):
The widget below visualizes how the error messages evolved over time.
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But I think that ultimately, the most interesting thing about this is the evolution process of these messages itself, which demonstrates that a lot of effort has to be put into the messages to make them really good. To someone, it might seem like these messages are somehow automatically derived from the compilation process, and we get them “for free”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is the result of a continuous design, implementation, review and testing effort that has been performed by hundreds of individual contributors over the span of more than ten years.
Previously:
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I have yet to do any programming in Rust. Sometime I should give it a try and see what all the hubbub is about.
