Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Saturday, 10 March 2012 at 04:40:11 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Yeah, the kernel is decent about it, but the rest of the
> system sure as hell isn't.

Let me tie this into D. A couple weeks ago, I revived one of
my work D projects - about 30,000 lines of code - that was
dormant for about a year.

The language worked fine. The library was a bit more of
a pain.

std.date's deprecation still makes me mad.

And the move of std.string.replace over to std.array meant
not one of the modules compiled without a change.

(Really easy change: "import std.string : replace;" why
that works and  "import std.string;" doesn't I'm not sure.
I'm probably relying on a bug here!)



But still, the D language manages to move forward without
much breakage. dmd pretty much gets better each release.


Phobos has some breakage though. Not really bad; updating
this code went quickly. I think I spent half an hour on it.
But, there was some minor changes needed.



We might have a stable language, but if the library doesn't
do the same, we'll never be Windows.