How often does Rust change?

This essay is taking the language author&#x27;s perspective, but IMO the user&#x27;s perspective is different and more important.<p>I think what people mean when they say the language changed isn&#x27;t <i>literally</i> &quot;the language changed&quot;. It&#x27;s actually <i>what the user is supposed to do</i> changed: The idioms changed. The ecosystem changed. Code that I wrote two years ago still works but it looks foreign to new developers.

The main question for me is what the half life is for code I write. In c, with no dependencies, and -Werror disabled, it is likely decades. In python with lots of dependencies, it is probably weeks or months.<p>Where does rust with lots of dependencies (since that seems to be what cargo encourages) sit on the spectrum?

This needs a 2020 in the headline. Previously discussed at length.

Note: this is from April 2020.

I think the best way to assess if the language has changed a lot, is to crowdsource changelog ratings from users directly.<p>They (we?) are the most concerned about changes, and the best suited to tell if async&#x2F;await is a bigger feature than const fns.

&#x27;steveklabnik - do you have the raw data still? I don&#x27;t think I see it linked in the post, and it&#x27;d be interesting both for seeing what the major features are and for keeping the log up to date.

If my source code still builds, does change matter? In my personal opinion, it does not. However, if I have to change my source code when a new release comes out, then it&#x27;s an issue.

* Cries in Java - nay - ECMAScript version ES.Next Draft ECMA-262 *