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.
> 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?
> 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.
Easy example of a basic method that has been unstable for a really long time: [T]::as_slice [0] since 2024 [1]. Apparently, stabilization was attempted earlier this year [2] but was then rolled back [3]. While clearly it was not yet ready for stabilization, it still took over a year before the first attempt.
Another one: Option::zip_with [4] since 2020 because nobody's figured out if it's worth having over .zip(...).map(...). Option::zip was actually stabilized [5] later in 2020 but Option::zip_with has since been sitting in limbo for over five years.
Another one: <*const [T]>::as_ptr also since 2020 [6]. I can't remember if there's an alternative now but dealing with slice pointers without relying on unstable methods has historically been very difficult/annoying. I ran into a bunch of this kinda stuff while working on a crate for iterating over rows/columns of image buffer subregions, because I wanted to use and support slice pointers. (Specifically I think getting the length of the slice pointer was nearly impossible without invoking UB, because constructing a reference (which was the only safe way to access a len method) could break aliasing rules. However I think the len method on slice pointers was stabilized a while ago so that particular problem is no more.) Speaking of which, <*mut [T]>::split_at_mut has been unstable since 2022 [7]...
I'm not saying there's no reason for any of this, just that as a Rust developer it's been frustrating. There are enough of these all over the place that it feels like a real occurring problem, even if it's not reasonable to expect a volunteer open-source project to pay full attention to everything ever.
> Are you saying it doesn't suggest unstable features when using a stable toolchain? That was not my experience before I started using nightly.
Oh really? I've never used any Jetbrain product so I don't know but if it's indeed the case even when you don't even use a nightly toolchain that sounds like a very bad design.
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.