Rust 1.x seems to not always be backward compatible in practice
For a long time now, I've needed (or at least wanted) to simultaneously
put a stress load on a test NFS fileserver and a stress CPU and memory load on
another machine. Back in the old days on Linux, I would have done
this by compiling the Linux kernel repeatedly, but in today's modern
age the Linux kernel isn't big enough any more; it builds too fast
and isn't big enough. I eventually settled on repeatedly building
Firefox from source, partly because it's something I'm already
familiar with. Specifically, on one of
our Ubuntu 18.04 LTS machines I wound up building the then current
release version of Firefox with a then current Rust version installed
into a custom location with Rustup. Everything
worked fine for a long time, and then one day I made the mistake
of absently deciding to run 'rustup upgrade' on my custom Rust
location. My Firefox builds immediately blew up with a series of
Cargo errors
and then later Rust errors.
I was unable to fix this and restore my Firefox build environment to a working state. In particular, it appears that older versions of Firefox (beyond some point I didn't try to determine precisely) can't be built with modern versions of Rust and Cargo (which is tightly coupled to Rust). You can to some extent patch Cargo.toml files so that Cargo will accept them, but the Rust errors were beyond my ability to deal with. My eventual solution was to obtain the current Firefox release, the current Rust release, and run Firefox's own 'build a custom virtual environment with all of your build dependencies' script. Someday this too will break, and in the mean time any performance measurements from before this transition aren't compatible with those after it, since I'm building different things with a different toolchain.
All of this was very startling to me, especially the Rust compile time errors. I'm used to Go, where there is a strong commitment to keeping old Go code building properly even as Go moves forward (but unfortunately less commitment to how the Go equivalent of Cargo works). Rust is evidently moving more aggressively than that to develop their language and are willing to invalidate older code if they feel strongly enough about this. When I am in a bad mood, I feel that means that 'Rust 1.x' is not really '1.x' as I would consider it. Either Rust has not really reached 1.0 yet or there have been a whole series of '2.0', '3.0' and so on Rust releases that are not actually labeled as such.
Update: Much of this is a Firefox problem, where Mozilla has apparently specifically set an environment variable to enabled unstable and changing Rust features in the stable Rust compiler. The effect is to tie specific Firefox versions to a narrow range of Rust stable compiler versions that implement the specific unstable features that Firefox's code expects.
I'm sure that Rust people have a whole series of good explanations for why all of this was necessary and why it's a good thing that I can no longer build older versions of Firefox (for instance, some of the Rust errors may be for things that were unsafe but not previously detected). All I can say is that as an outsider, the resulting experience is not a particularly good one.
(Rust is not the only language and build environment that can suffer from this; C compilers can give you issues if you tell them to abort on warnings.)
(This elaborates on some Tweets of mine at the time.)
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