Alice Ryhl

But different crates can use different additions.

And so I might have a crate using the 2025 edition of the language.

And I can keep using that forever because Rust has a really, really high backwards compatibility guarantee.

So you write all of your code, and the guarantee is that it's going to keep working forever.

That's the idea, anyway.

Additions are basically the way that Rust makes breaking changes without breaking people.

Because they might change the syntax of the language.

For example, async await was added to an addition.

And so code using the old edition can't use async await.

There you could have a variable called async if you want.

Let async equal five.

And then in the new edition, you can't.

But you can still mix and match code written in different editions so they work together.

So I might have a library written in the 2021 edition and you can write your library in 2024 edition or your binary project.

And then you can still use my library.

Really, the big idea is to say, we want the old code to continue working, but we still want to change the language.

And so the difference from other kinds of versions of languages, I mean, Python 2 version, Python 3 comes to mind, is that you can totally mix and match in any way you want.

We have, of course, the language team, which, you know, they have meetings every week and they do a lot of stuff and so on and so forth.

The language team advisor role is a way to be part of the language team light in some sense.

So you're someone that they've said, okay, we trust this person's opinion.