There are a couple of fairly popular libraries that were nicer to use on nightly Rust (serde and diesel), but could otherwise work on Rust stable. The "nicer to use on nightly" is going away with the next stable release of Rust. Other than that, the vast majority of the ecosystem is on Rust stable.
Unfortunately "the next stable is the one you want" has been the story for quite a while now. Since this is ostensibly a thread comparing with go, I'll note that their story is more like "the next release will be better, but don't wait for it".
> Unfortunately "the next stable is the one you want" has been the story for quite a while now.
I don't recall anyone ever saying this, where "the one you want" means "the one that supports procedural macros".
We have had this discussion for a very long time, and it has always centered around serde and diesel. Those have been the biggest nightly users since 1.0, and probably before then.
> Unfortunately "the next stable is the one you want" has been the story for quite a while now.
Not really. serde and diesel have been more convenient on nightly for a long time now. It is only just now that we can say the "next stable" because that's when the particular feature they need will be stable.
> I'll note that their story is more like "the next release will be better, but don't wait for it".
I can't wait to use Go's `sort.Slice` function[1], but I'll have to wait for the next stable release.
Seriously though, I'd say the key difference between Go and Rust on this venue is that while Rust is stable, there's still more stuff we'd like to add. To that end, we encourage experimentation by making the acquisition of a nightly Rust compiler really easy. This naturally leads to people experimenting with nightly and publishing crates that either use it or require it. This is a necessary part of experimenting with new features and getting feedback.
Go's scope for experimentation is much smaller. Their changes are much more incremental and conservative. It's a really nice benefit of using Go.
My point is: this is a trade off and it should be presented as such. In Rust land, it requires that you---the user of Rust---ignore crates that require nightly or ignore features of crates that require nightly.
