On Saturday, March 10, 2012 17:29:49 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > And seriously, name changes are one hell of a *trivial* breaking change. > Some people here makes it sound like name changes are akin to...I > dunno...banning templates or something.
But it's still a breaking change, and existing projects then won't build until they update everything to match. Walter seems to be arguing that trivial changes are the worst, because they break code _without_ adding much value. At least with large breaking changes, it's generally adding a lot of value, otherwise the change wouldn't have happened. > I happily switched from C++ to D. *That's* a "breaking change". Sure. But there's plenty of D code which already exists which must deal with breaking changes, and that body of code is only increasing in size. So, the cost of making a breaking change to the language or standard library is only going up. Take Adam Ruppe, for instance. He's got a fair bit of code in D which he uses professionally, and he tends to get ticked when breaking changes are made. And he's an active member of this newsgroup, so he's generally aware of the situation. It's that much worse for anyone using D who isn't active here. If a breaking change adds enough value (i.e. it Walter's "very high bar"), then we'll do it. But making breaking changes just to tweak a few things is becoming increasingly costly. It affects every user of D, and those numbers are growing. - Jonathan M Davis
