aturon

FWIW, this was part of the story from the beginning (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2052)

> Firefox Quantum doesn't involve much of breaking changes (if you don't consider deprecating the old plugins one, that is).

They weren't just deprecated; they stopped working.

> I don't see Q3 2018 as any sort of "quantum leap"

For people following Rust closely, the Rust 2018 release won't be so special. But most people aren't keeping up with the details of new releases every six weeks; for them, we have an opportunity to take stock of what's changed over the last couple of years, explain the impact on idioms and how to transition code.

Remember that Rust is fairly unique in having a six week release cycle. Most other languages have a much slower release cycle, where every release is "major". Editions give us a way to pull together the rapid work we're doing into a coherent story.

From a management perspective, it's also a very useful way of focusing our effort as a community, to make sure all the pieces we've been working on are coming together into a polished whole on a clear timeline.

By contrast, for a language like Go, it's probably more practical to ship entire apps, rather than embedding in libraries, because there's significantly more overhead in terms of runtime system support.

There was a post just the other day on the Rust reddit telling this story: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/67m4eh/rust_day_two_a..., with a choice quote: "I feel like I discovered a programming super power or something. I mean I did expect it to be faster, but not this much faster this easily!" You can also check out the videos here: http://usehelix.com/resources

Rust also makes it much easier to write reliable software. The best example of this is with multithreaded programming (which is something you might reach for for speed), where Rust gives you guarantees not found in any other major language: you can know for sure that data is owned by one thread and not accessible by others, and the compiler will check this for you. You can know for sure that you only access lock-protected data while holding the lock. Rust will check thread safety for you, and more. You can read more about the concurrency benefits here: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht...

Relative to Go specifically, in addition to the reliability improvements, Rust supports a wider range of "systems" use cases. Unlike Go, it does not require a garbage collector or other runtime system, which makes it very easy to write small Rust components that can be used with a large script, or to write extremely performance-sensitive or low-level code like a browser or game engine, an operating system, or a bare-metal web server. One reason that Dropbox switched to Rust from Go for one of their core components is greater control over memory footprint, which allowed them to reduce their server memory needs by 4x, leading to significant financial savings.

The slogan I've been using for Rust personally is: Confident, Productive Systems Programming. You can write fast code. You can write low-level code. You can do it with high productivity, thanks to the work on modern tooling and ergonomics. But most importantly, you can do all of this fearlessly, because the Rust compiler has your back.