Survey results: Rust values backward compatibility as a community, but as individuals are willing to make breaking changes

As promised, here are the results of a survey about breaking changes we ran last fall.

Rust developers believe the ecosystem <a href=”Software Ecosystem Survey>values “openness and fairness” more than the other 17 ecosystems we surveyed.

They place Rust in the top three ecosystems along with Perl and Eclipse in terms of valuing <a href=”Software Ecosystem Survey>stability/backward compatibility, yet, personally, developers claim to <a href=”Software Ecosystem Survey>value stability less than they believe the community does as a whole (dotted line is personal values, solid is perceived community value). They also claim to <a href=”Software Ecosystem Survey>make breaking changes more often, and to make <a href=”Software Ecosystem Survey>fewer design compromises in the name of backward compatibility.

There are a lot of other results on the linked site, and we’re interested in your impressions. Do the results make sense to you? What answers would you have expected? Do you think the differences are intentional? If you have any thoughts about it I’ll try to keep up with comments here, or you can also send us comments through the website.

We want to sincerely thank the people in the Rust community who responded, and we’re eager to hear what you think!

Chris, Anna, Jim, and Christian

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I think there may be something wrong with the links in this post.

Links in the post don't work for me either.

I guess these are the results: How Ecosystem Cultures Differ (Survey Results)

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