Rust's popularity despite the challenges of navigating the borrow checker has me rethinking what turns people away from Haskell. Specifically, the types are often blamed, but I don't think that's a major factor.
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As somebody who likes Haskell but uses Rust mainly, I put backwards compatibility (of the language and base), the way library versioning is handled (multiple versions of a dependency don't break the build), as some big reasons I avoid using it.
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You avoid Rust for how it handles library versioning? I'm maintaining a strict lack of opinion on that since Rust is so much newer that it hasn't yet encountered all the library versioning challenges older languages have.
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Oh, I mean I use Rust because of its approach. I find it incredibly frustrating the way Cabal and OPAM require single versions of libraries in a build tree. Allowing duplicates does have issues, but I find those more tolerable. 😅
Like if I add library X to my Cabal file, and then later add library Y, there's always a chance that my library will fail to build with a confusing constraint error due to an incompatibility in some common ancestor dependency Z having an incompatible version.
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All true, but I do think the Rust package ecosystem will hit its own strain points (e.g. tokio vs async-std today) as it grows and the pace of development gets less uniform. But we've been talking about external things almost exclusively here, and I agree, these are essential!
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