What it'll take to eradicate unintended breakage from Rust
by Predrag Gruevski
Unintentional breakage sucks for everyone involved. It’s a sociotechnical problem, and we need to do better on both the “socio” and the “technical” parts. SemVer is a part of it, but just a small part: it doesn’t cover ABI stability, some stability guarantees are fuzzy (does impl PartialOrd mean “some order exists” or “this specific order is guaranteed”?), some changes are “breaking but not major” etc. If running cargo update breaks my program, being told “sorry, that change was breaking but not major” isn’t any consolation!
Solving this will require a user-centric view of breakage. Acting upon that view will require the enthusiastic participation of a broad set of folks who will be in the room. At minimum: rustdoc, cargo, lang, compiler, libs, crates.io + docs.rs. That’s a lot of people! But here we get to decide what the experience of using Rust in 2030 and beyond is like, and I’d like to make a pitch for why this investment will pay off spectacularly if we do it right.
Speaker
Predrag Gruevski
Predrag has spent the last 9 years working on query engines for almost every kind of data imaginable: from relational and graph databases to APIs and unstructured data files. He built Trustfall, a universal query engine that can query any data source(s), and cargo-semver-checks, a semantic versioning linter for Rust.
Previously, Predrag was a principal engineer at Kensho Technologies, did performance engineering research at MIT, and competed in international math and programming competitions.
When not in front of a screen, Predrag enjoys skiing, ice hockey, and board games. He is also a huge space nerd. Ask him about the time he went to watch a giant rocket explode!