Today marks the 10th anniversary of Rust 1.0. Rust 1.87 will be released live on stage at the 10 years of Rust celebration this afternoon (hosted by RustWeek, there are still tickets I heard). I've been a user of Rust for about that long*. Over these past 10 years, Rust had a major positive impact on my life in various ways, and I'm extremely grateful for that. Thanks to all Rust contributors and to our community, it has been a blast 🎉.

A anniversary is usually a good moment to look forward, but it also marks a good moment to take a step back, and reflect a bit on the past. Yesterday I scrolled back through the release notes for a bit, and reflected on some improvements which I've been taking more and more for granted.

The one which pops out of that list the most (for me) is probably the ? operator. It was stabilized in Rust 1.13.0, but prototyped via the try! macro some time before that. I can truthfully say that every time I write in another language, I miss that ? and the associated Try trait (I kind of wish the trait was marked stable 😅).

The other big ones which made Rust less cumbersome to write were of course non lexical lifetimes, lifetime elision improvements, the deref improvements (no more &***) and a boat load of library improvements. ^{And then there is of course the documentation. And the tools. And the always helpful community. And the transparent in the open development. And so much more.}

The time where a large portion of the community was on nightly by default is now far in the past. With the vision doc for Rust taking shape, and likely hundreds of other improvements, I can't wait for the next 10 years of stable Rust.

* I couldn't tell you exactly when I started using Rust, but I recall vividly some of the pre-1.0 releases and their breaking changes, so I guess somewhere around 2014? It doesn't really matter 🙃. Rust rocks 🦀!