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LoganDarktoday at 3:48 AM2 repliesview on HN

It's been annoying to me as an end user that so many basic things require nightly. I use nightly as my main toolchain, but enabling unstable features makes a project nightly-only, which is undesired for crates that don't already revolve around the unstable feature.

I most often encounter unstable features when I reach for a basic common-sense utility method and discover that it's not stable. Like just earlier today I would have reached for bool::toggle which not only is unstable, but is also newly added as of like a month ago! but some unstable methods have been sitting around for years.

And now that IntelliJ-Rust is proprietary, I can't even make a feature request anymore for the ability to exclude unstable features from the autocomplete. So they will taunt me forever, perfect little helpers just locked away.


Replies

stymaartoday at 7:33 AM

> It's been annoying to me as an end user that so many basic things require nightly

It used to be the case a decade ago, but now I wouldn't agree that any "basic" things require nightly (I wouldn't call portable SIMD "basic" at all for instance).

> Like just earlier today I would have reached for bool::toggle which not only is unstable, but is also newly added as of like a month ago!

This is very likely not the kind of feature that will stay on nightly for a long time, but is instead one of the many convenience feature that land on stable every release. The 6-weeks release cadence with beta in between means there's always at least 6 weeks and up to 3 months between the time a feature land on nightly and the day it reaches stable, even if the feature is as consensual as this one.

> And now that IntelliJ-Rust is proprietary, I can't even make a feature request anymore for the ability to exclude unstable features from the autocomplete.

Can't you tell it to use stable as the default target, and use nightly manually in cargo?

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nirvdrumtoday at 5:43 AM

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