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Everything I know about good API design

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428 points ahamez | 1 comments | 24 Aug 25 19:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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dwattttt ◴[24 Aug 25 22:53 UTC] No.45008529[source]▶
The reminder to "never break userspace" is good, but people never bring up the other half of that statement: "we can and will break kernel APIs without warning".

It illustrates that the reminder isn't "never change an API in a way that breaks someone", it's the more nuanced "declare what's stable, and never break those".

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chubot ◴[24 Aug 25 23:04 UTC] No.45008615[source]▶
Yeah, famously there is no stable public driver API for Linux, which I believe was the motivation for Google’s Fuschia OS

So Linux is opinionated in both directions - towards user space and toward hardware - but in the opposite way

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1. matheusmoreira ◴[25 Aug 25 17:45 UTC] No.45016567[source]▶
It's not just opinionation though. It's the kernel's leverage against the people who would keep their modules out of the git tree instead of contributing them. Those people literally get left behind and they are forced to pay maintainers to chase a continuously moving target. The solution to that is to contribute the code.