Is D right for me?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-10-11 06:54, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday 10 October 2010 21:26:28 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I think it's a bit hasty to speak on behalf of all of Phobos'
>> participants. Phobos 2 is indeed different from Phobos 1 but
>> backward-incompatible changes to Phobos 2 are increasingly rare.
>
> Sorry if I overstepped my bounds on that. It's just that from what I've seen,
> the Phobos devs have been quite willing to make backwards incompatible changes
> if they thought that they were an improvement, though they aren't done all that
> frequently. Backwards compatability is considered, but improvements to the API
> seem to override it.
>
> Regardless, the result is that if you wrote your code for dmd 2.040 or something
> similar and ended up trying to update it to 2.050, you'd likely have a number of
> changes to make, though porting from Phobos 1 would be far worse. If Phobos were
> completely stable or at least never made backwards-compatability breaking
> changes, that wouldn't be the case. I fully expect that as Phobos matures, such
> breaking changes will become quite rare if not outright nonexistent, but they do
> still happen. Actually deprecating and replacing the modules that are intended
> to be deprecated and replace will help a lot with that, but that obviously takes
> time.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I think it's time to separate the compiler, the language and phobos in 
the releases. One idea is the use three numbers to indicate a release of 
phobos, major, minor and build, like this: 2.4.3. Increment the build 
number when a implementation detail is changed the doesn't change the 
API. Increment the minor number when a backwards compatible API change 
is made and increment the major number when a API change is made that 
break backwards compatibility.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg