Breaking backwards compatiblity

[David Nadlinger]

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