What it'll take to eradicate unintended breakage from Rust - Predrag Gruevski

Unintentional breakage sucks for everyone involved. It’s a sociotechnical problem, and we need to do better on both the “socio” and the “technical” parts. SemVer is a part of it, but just a small part: it doesn’t cover all aspects of stability, some stability guarantees are fuzzy, some changes are “breaking but not major” etc. If running cargo update breaks my program, being told “sorry, that change was breaking but not major” isn’t any consolation!

Solving this will require a user-centric view of breakage. Acting upon that view will require the enthusiastic participation of a broad set of folks who will be in the room. At minimum: rustdoc, cargo, lang, compiler, libs, crates.io + docs.rs. That’s a lot of people! But here we get to decide what the experience of using Rust in 2030 and beyond is like, and I’d like to make a pitch for why this investment will pay off spectacularly if we do it right.

You can find Predrag on:
Twitter:   / predraggruevski  
Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@predrag
GitHub: https://github.com/obi1kenobi
Website: https://predr.ag/

This talk was given at Rust Week 2025, in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Playlist of other talks from Rust Week 2025:    • RustWeek 2025 - All talks  

Want to come to Rust Week 2026 in-person? go to https://2026.rustweek.org