[OT] Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2020-08-17 00:03, jmh530 wrote:
> Ran across this via reddit yesterday and thought people here might find 
> it interesting.
> 
> https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc 

If you never can remove anything, you have to live with the old baggage 
forever. The means documentation, books, specs and other material that 
wants to be complete need to still include the deprecated things. There 
are also some language issue that can never be fixed, like implicitly 
convert integer and character literals to bool (I guess they could be 
fixed by introducing new types). With a library code it's much easier, 
just point users to a new function.

This is basically what happens to C++. Adding new things, never remove 
the old. The old will always be around. I'm sure there still new code 
being written that uses old style C++. The biggest advantage and 
disadvantage with C++ is the C source level compatibility.

Perhaps something like editions in Rust. For D, that would be something 
like supporting D2 and adding new non-breaking things to it. At the same 
time developing D3 which gets the new non-breaking things and possibly 
breaking changes as well. Both editions working side by side in the same 
application. But it's the same problem as always, we don't have the 
manpower.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg