Rust has managed just fine to remain mostly backwards compatible since 1.0 , while still allowing for evolution of the language through editions.

This puts much more work on the compiler development side, but it's a great boon for the ecosystem.

To be fair, zig is pre 1.0, but Zig is also already 8 years old. Rust turned 1.0 at ~ 5 years, I think.

Rust started in 2006 and reached v1 in 2015, that's 9 years.