Thoughts on versioning
Adam D Ruppe
destructionator at gmail.com
Fri Oct 29 20:39:56 UTC 2021
On Friday, 29 October 2021 at 19:21:43 UTC, harakim wrote:
> I dread coming back to my projects and having to spend time to
> get them to recompile.
Do you have a recollection of why, specifically they would fail
to compile when you get back to them? Language changes? Std lib
changes? Third party libs? And how difficult it was to update
them?
"breakage" isn't really a binary yes/no thing. Some are worse
than others. One example I did in my minigui was misspell a word.
I made that a deprecated alias with the message saying "it was
misspelled, use THIS instead".
Now, worth noting, that isn't exactly breakage, since you can
just ignore the message. I've left it like that for years now; it
doesn't really hurt anything. (My own libs' policy is actually
pretty strict - I almost never break anything and maintain
compatibility with both old and new compilers, and with simple
build systems; my "no breakage" policy even includes the specific
compile command line. And when I do break something, I make it as
easy as I can think of to make migration quick and painless.)
But still that's an example of a partial break that is easy to
deal with. Should be able to update it in a matter of minutes.
And compatibility shims are easy: the deprecated alias is
something you could too in your code. Doesn't have to be in mine.
So you can choose your own compiler as well.
This is how I'd like the stdlib to be too. Where changes are
needed, you make it easy. Where they're not needed, you can leave
it alone.
Phobos needs some changes right now. That doesn't mean you have
to delete the current code, but you also can't leave it alone out
of fear of what might happen.
> Why doesn't it compile?
I'd like to know that too. Is it really the language's fault? And
why couldn't you keep using the same version you had before?
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list