Why Phobos is cool

[Avrina]

On Thursday, 25 June 2020 at 06:52:05 UTC, Petar Kirov 
[ZombineDev] wrote:
> Since std.experimental.allocator was added to Phobos circa 
> 2015, there hasn't been a single Phobos or Druntime module 
> using it (ndslice and checkedint don't count). Many packages on 
> code.dlang.org enthusiastically embraced 
> std.experimental.allocator only to get burned a few dmd 
> releases after as Phobos doesn't follow SemVer. The solution? 
> Many of the most popular OSS D apps libraries (I can only 
> comment on those) transitioned to using the Dub fork: 
> https://github.com/dlang-community/stdx-allocator. How does it 
> help? Well, OSS D libraries can't control the compiler that 
> their users are using. For example, vibe.d tries to support the 
> last 5 major versions of dmd/ldc, and Dub the last 15+ major 
> versions. This means they can't depend on std.experimental.* as 
> there's no telling what kind changes can happen for such a 
> large timespan. Instead they can stick a particular version of 
> https://code.dlang.org/packages/stdx-allocator in their 
> dub.{json,sdl} file and be sure that it won't suddenly break 
> their code.

This gets brought up quite often. Breaking changes doesn't seem 
to be a concern. I'm not even talking about the DIP changes that 
are going to cause breaking changes. There's just compiler 
changes that break codes for almost every new release. There 
doesn't even need to be a big change, just slowing down the 
releases would help. So there's less versions you have to deal 
with to support a longer term of time.