I pushed a new version of redis-cell today, a project that I still somewhat maintain, but only touch once a year or so.

While looking into another issue that someone had filed, I got the bright idea to update the project’s dependencies. That was a mistake, and I ended up sinking hours into fixing calls to the time crate. It wasn’t just that a few breaking changes had been introduced – no, the entire API had changed, and every use of any function or type from the create had to be fixed. There was no upgrade guide.

I really want to like Rust, but something like this happens every time I go back to the language. This wasn’t some novel third party dependency that broke. It was time, one of the most core facilities of any programming language, and although the changes that broke me are older now, a cursory look at the project’s changelog shows that it’s regularly deprecating/changing API on recent versions.

Zero cost abstractions are cool, but you know what I like better? Stability.