A friend and I are working on adding Rust support to Metaparticle.

We did a simple search for “decorators in Rust” and found this repo, which seemed promising. My friend added it, but soon found it wouldn’t build without using the nightly channel of rustc. I didn’t notice right away, because I like to experiment with Rust and have been running nightly by default for months, but my friend found this very off-putting. From his perspective, it seems like he can’t adopt Rust yet, because too many libraries require nightly, which makes it seem like the language isn’t production-ready yet.

When I started working with Rust, I also found that, for many things, I needed to be on the nightly channel. In my case I just ran rustup default nightly and forgot, since my Rust projects are mostly hobbies and I like running beta and nightly versions of things anyway.

But here’s my question for the Rust community in 2018: What can we do to make things more stable? Can we get Clippy and rustfmt to 1.0? Can we stabilize more language features? A more specific question I have is: What can I, or other people not one the core team, do to help stabilize Rust? I probably won’t be able to make a PR to the compiler for quite some time. Are these crates that need nightly, and aren’t on 1.0 yet, simply waiting for some language feature to stabilize? If so, how can I help? If not, what are they waiting for?

The Rust Community is off to an explosively good start – we have Meetups in dozens of cities, tons of interesting open source projects, and a supportive culture. But I think adoption is really slowed by the sheer number of crates that either won’t build without the nightly compiler, or are a version 0.1.2 or so.

The thing I would like to see most in 2018 is a clear process for me to help the language and ecosystem appear to stabilize. Is there a crate that’s 2 good PR’s from being 1.0 on stable? I would love to make those PRs, but I don’t have a reliable way of finding that crate. And what can be done, besides PRs to the compiler, to help the language itself stabilize more features?

Thanks,

Will