> often with no attempt made to explain why. It's particularly likely to happen when members of the Mozilla, JavaScript or Rust communities are involved
Your repetitive comments about Rust's instability almost always receive a lot of feedback about why they are incorrect and/or invalid.
In no way can Rust be considered "stable". The most recent version is 0.10 (that is, it's still very pre-1.0), it's undergoing significant breaking changes on an ongoing basis, and even its home page warns that "Rust is a work-in-progress and may do anything it likes up to and including eating your laundry."
Anyone who points out that Rust is just not stable yet is absolutely correct. Anyone who points out that it's looking unlikely that it will be stable before the promised end-of-2014 deadline for 1.0 is also correct.
It doesn't matter who points out these facts, or how many times they do so. The facts are still facts, and whoever expresses them is totally correct.
My suspicion is that the inappropriate downvoting is just immaturity on the part of the Rust developers. I realize that it can hurt to face valid criticism of one's work, but an important part of being a professional adult is to consider such criticism rationally, and to learn how to improve based upon it. Engaging in censorship of facts, however, completely contradicts with self-improvement.
It renders the voting system useless when it's incorrectly used to censor others, due to a lack of emotional control on the part of the person misusing the system.
It's one thing to downvote blatant commercial spam that has no inherent value. It's harmful to downvote perfectly legitimate commentary that you may just happen to disagree with, however.
It's clear that Rust isn't stable yet, and won't be for a long time. It's impossible for me or anyone else to be incorrect when we point out that very real fact.
If you feel the need to vote down perfectly legitimate comments merely expressing a truth that you dislike, so be it. I can't stop you, and the others you've chosen to target can't stop you, either. However, reality will be reality, regardless of the voting. Rust will still remain unstable no matter how many down arrows you click.
Well, the trend so far has been a serious lack of language and library stability, and there's very little to suggest that the situation will change any time soon.
Stability isn't something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of discipline, and this discipline has to be ingrained within the very project itself. I don't see this as the case with Rust.
If you were following Rust at all you would know that they are aggressively rejecting requests for new features in order to produce a stable release, and have five full-time developers working on clearing release blockers.
Your repetitive comments about Rust's instability almost always receive a lot of feedback about why they are incorrect and/or invalid.