Breaking backwards compatiblity
David Nadlinger
see at klickverbot.at
Sun Mar 11 14:59:56 PDT 2012
On Friday, 9 March 2012 at 22:41:22 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> Most bug fixes are breaking changes. I don't think we are there
> yet.
In my opinion, this is a very interesting and important
observation – due to the powerful meta-programming and
reflection capabilities, most of the time the question is not
whether a change is backward compatibile or not, but rather how
_likely_ it is to break code. There isn't really a good way to
avoid that, even more so if your language allow testing whether a
given piece of code compiles or not.
A related problem is that we still don't quite have an
appropriate language spec, so you can never be sure if you code
is really »correct« or if you are relying on DMD implementation
details – I'm sure everybody who had their meta-programming
heavy code break due to a seemingly unrelated DMD bugfix knows
what I'm trying to say…
David
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