alt Hacker News> Rust is evolving far too fast to be used in code which needs to run for years to decades down the line.
Code doesn’t stop running on existing hardware when the language changes in a future compiler. You can still use the same old toolchain.
I’ve done a lot of embedded development in a past life. Keeping old tool chains around for each old platform was standard.
I would much rather go through the easy process of switching to an older Rust tool chain to build something than all of the games we played to keep entire VMs archived with a snapshot of a vendor tool chain that worked to build something.
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> You can still use the same old toolchain.
Unless you find out the compiler was buggy and was producing faulty binaries, but the new compiler can no longer compile the old code.
> You can still use the same old toolchain.
If you keep your old computer around, yes.
The good news is that C seems also contaminated with "move fast, break things " phylosophy. The modern code writer is not able to make things that last more than a couple of months.
I remember a coworker having to fight with an old platform's build not working because our user/group IDs were bigger than 2^16. I can't remember which utility was causing the problem, I'd have to guess tar. This is when we learned to play the archive a VM game.