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Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate

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228 points Retro_Dev | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 04:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.221s | source
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zwnow ◴[04 Jul 25 06:46 UTC] No.44461773[source]▶
And this is exactly why you do not use shiny new languages for your projects. Hope tigerbeetle won't have too much trouble with this
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Hamuko ◴[04 Jul 25 07:04 UTC] No.44461858[source]▶
Are people deploying production code in a language that is still in its 0.x version?
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cenamus ◴[04 Jul 25 07:10 UTC] No.44461901[source]▶
I mean, what's the difference to the python 2/3 debacle? People were writing/extending in python 2 long after it was declared obsolete
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1. mirashii ◴[04 Jul 25 07:35 UTC] No.44462086[source]▶
It's not about sticking around on an old version, it's about ever being able to catch up, and what the rest of the ecosystem is going to do. Python did this major version bump that broke a lot of the ecosystem, and it went so poorly that they've effectively promised never to do it again and completely excised any thought of ever having a major version bump again, and other languages and communities now point to it regularly as a debacle to be avoided.

When you break things regularly, you're forcing a choice on every individual package in the ecosystem: move forward, and leave the old users behind, or stay behind, and risk that the rest of the ecosystem moves forward without you. Now you've got a whole ecosystem in a prisoner's dilemma. For an individual, maybe you can make a choice and dig in and make your way along without too much trouble. But the ecosystem as a whole can't, the ecosystem fractures, and if it doesn't converge on the latest version, it slowly withers and dies.