When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? [LWN.net]

When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience?

Posted Jun 28, 2025 22:02 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: When is Rust going to have a stable distro experience? by SLi
Parent article: Getting extensions to work with free-threaded Python

> Then you will fix that, and _only_ that.

Means: you don't bring new version of Python, you don't bring new version cryptography and that means you don't need new version of Rust, either… where's promised false dichotomy?

> Would you expect something the magnitude of a Linux kernel to stay bug compatible to an old version if you swapped the toolchain used to build it?

Why, yes, of course. It's in the same position as everything else: on ToT branch it's built with latest approved version of clang and on frozen “security fixed only” branch it's compiled with the same toolchain that was used when that branch was cut.

> It's just not at all the same world where "just update the tools" is feasible.

Yes, it is same world. Android AOSP build is updated every quarter and that update very much includes update to the toolchain, too. Different vendors may update their branches on a different cadence, sure, but situation where you may upgrade new version of Python or bring “latest and greatest” version cryptography package but, for some strange reason, couldn't upgrade toolchain is simply not in the cards.

These are similarly disruptive operations (I would even say that upgrade of python is much more disruptive, potentially, because rust incompatibilities tend to break compilation of your code while python upgrade often can break things that your test may miss), why should they be treated differently?