It's not that Rust is bad, it's great. But right now the dev culture is all about $latest and there aren't many Rust devs that care if you can compile and run it on your 2 year old distro. This is also why 99% of rust documentation starts with telling you to install rust-up from out of repo third party sources: your local repository rust, no matter how new, is already out of date.
This comes up with Java as well. Lots of distros ship with "java X" and ignore the version march. Ultimately you end up going around package management if you want to stay up to date.
I'm not sure the best way to fix this. A lot of distros want to treat everything like they treat GCC and C++. C++ which releases new versions every 3 years or so which means that having a version of GCC 1 or 2 years out of date doesn't generally matter.
> the vast majority of devs using Rust are the type that use $latest features and Rust adds $latest features at a blinding rate compared to established languages.
A major complaint I have about rust devs is so many libs require nightly rust. That, IMO, is inexcusable. Sure, it's ok to try out those features, but why are you publishing libraries that REQUIRE those features to work? That seems like just a generally bad idea.
> This is also why 99% of rust documentation starts with telling you to install rust-up from out of repo third party sources: your local repository rust, no matter how new, is already out of date.
With browser and Java that's already the case so I don't see this as an issue with rust. I'm not sure the best way to solve this, but I hardly think it's a rust issue so much as it's a problem with how dependency management works today.
Rocket still uses nightly https://rocket.rs/v0.4/guide/getting-started/
Not sure about others but those are the two I think of. It's usually something that comes up when I start playing with rust and want to do X. Last few times I've done that the nightly requirement hits.