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Rust2018–2025
rust-lang / reference

reference

The Rust Reference

8Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Rust Reference

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-05-15 18:50:26 UTC to 2025-08-20 00:03:00 UTC.

02462018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606

What Hacker News says

3 sources
> In C it’s undefined because it depends on how arguments are passed on the current platform (consider yourself lucky if you don’t remember __pascal or __stdcall). In Rust it’s undefined because there’s no format specification to tell you even that much. >> Regarding argument evaluation order, technically it is not yet documented https://github.com/rust-lang/reference/issues/248 but has been left-to-right for basically forever https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rust-expression-order-of-e... and I actually thought that it was documented as such. I am aware the word "undefined" references the order of evaluation. However, I just want to clear possible confusion on the matter. Code that depends on evaluation order doesn't produce undefined behaviour. It produces unspecified behaviour. (This is not a directly reply to Steve, who am I sure know
Read the rest
s more about this than I ever will).
In Why Rust is not a mature programming language
Everyone is going to have a different definition of "mature", and that's fine :) Obviously lots of respect for Kostya. I do think that framing these as "maturity" is a good framing, that is, fundamentally, he's right. A lot of this stuff has to do with Rust being so young, and in the future, it will be taken care of. I would argue that this is a significantly higher maturity requirement than most people actually need, and that Rust is more mature in other places and so may be for other people, but that's a different thing. My take on the state of these issues: > Rust does not have a formal language specification... I understand that adding new features is more important than documenting them but this is lame. Most languages do not. It also really depends on what you mean by "formal." It's not about being more important, it's that we valu
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e stability very strongly, and don't have the ability to document things with the guarantees we'd prefer. You might call it... not mature enough yet :) There's been a bunch of movement here, I'm excited to see it continue to develop! > Function/method calling convention. ... I’m told that newer versions of the compiler handle it just fine but the question still stands The objection here doesn't have to do with calling conventions, actually, this is about "two-phase borrowing," described in a series of blog posts ending here http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2017/03/01/nest... I believe this will get even better with polonius https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-belt-rust-2019/ Regarding argument evaluation order, technically it is not yet documented https://github.com/rust-lang/reference/issues/248 but has been left-to-right for basically forever https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rust-expression-order-of-e... and I actually thought that it was documented as such. I would expect this to shake out the exact same way as struct field destruction order, that is, something that's been one way for a long time and so we wouldn't change it even if maybe it's a good idea to. > Traits... the problem is not me being stupid but rather the lack of formal description on how it’s done and why what I want is so hard. Then I’d probably at least be able to realize how I should change my code to work around the limitations. Upcasting/downcasting is rarely used, and so has less love, generally, it's true. > First of all, bootstrapping process is laughably bad. So, Kostya acknowledges > Of course it’s a huge waste of resources for rather theoretical problem but it may prove beneficial for compiler design itself. Which is I think the way most feel about it. However, there is some desire to improve this, for other, related reasons. https://matklad.github.io/2020/09/12/rust-in-2021.html talks about some of them. > Then there’s LLVM dependency. While this stuff is all true, we wouldn't be where we are without it. Everything has upsides and downsides. > And finally there’s a thing related to the previous problem. Rust has poor support for assembly. He mentions asm; we're almost there! It took some time because it is not a simple problem. At the end of this, we'll have better support than C or C++ according to his metrics; these are not part of the language standard, so give his previous comments about maturity, I find this one a little weird, but it is what it is. :) > There’s also one problem with Rust std library that I should mention too. It’s useless for interfacing OS. Yes, the intention of the standard library is to be portable, so that's not really a goal. > But the proper solution would be to support at least OS-specific syscall() in std crate This may in fact be a good idea! I'm not sure how much use it would actually get.
In Why Rust is not a mature programming language

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