On 27.03.2017 20:08, Winnebeck, Jason wrote:
The key thing in my mind is that you can't make a change that breaks
100% of libraries at one time without fracturing the community or at
least introducing a major hindrance to upgrade that will mean
maintaining 2.x series for a very long time. Even if the upgrade
process is as easy as a recompile, there are a lot of published
libraries no longer maintained. Even for the ones that are
maintained, there are people who might not want to be forced to
upgrade every library. I'm not a Grails user, but my impression is
that the framework relies on a lot of plugins and is one of the (if
not the most) active Groovy communities and I have a hard time
envisioning how that upgrade path will take. You'd have to maintain
Groovy 2 and Groovy 3 versions of each plugin, and to upgrade you'd
have to upgrade everything at one time to the (most likely) latest
version.
What is the possibility that the package names are changed, the
parser, metaprogramming model, etc. that all break in Groovy 3
change, but yet still have a compatibility JAR implementing the
minimal Groovy 2.x classes in a way that allows interoperability with
Groovy 3 code? Theoretically at a worst case, Groovy 3 should be able
to view Groovy 2 classes the same way as any other Java class. I
think many concerns would be lifted if Groovy 2 and 3 could co-exist
at the same time, allowing you to upgrade incrementally.
If you see the new metaprogramming model as chance, then it would make
sense to implement that in the new packages instead of transferring old
and to be deprecated classes. The goal would the to be able to run old
and new system at the same time, where the Groovy 1.x/2.x classes would
use Groovy 3.x/4.x classes as implementation.
The problem with this approach is simply manpower and of course some
conceptual problems still to be solved.
bye Jochen
