What about "stability without stagnation"?

[nikomatsakis]

I think the slogan stability without stagnation is capturing something very important about Rust. I'm not sure if it's reflected in the current axioms. I can't quite put my finger on how to express it. I'll throw some thoughts in the comments.

[yoshuawuyts]

This makes me think of the recent AFIT stabilization: where we know it's not yet ready for 100% of all cases, but we're still choosing to stabilize a part of it as a step up.

I feel like when we talk about "Stability without stagnation" we often emphasize the: "we won't break backwards compat" aspect of it. Maybe it's in the framing, where "stability" (positive) is placed over "stagnation" (negative). I wonder if there's a way to phrase this where we can express "stagnation" as a positive, which captures our desire to incrementally ship parts of larger features.

Here's my first stab at trying to express both these properties as positives:

• stability (positive): if your code compiles today, we promise it will keep compiling on future versions of the compiler. You should never worry that updating your toolchain will break your code.
• incremental improvements (positive): Rust prefers to break big features up into smaller features, so they can be incrementally released as part of our regular release schedule. We prefer to continuously ship improvements rather than creating "big bang" releases.