alt Hacker NewsI think Rust has shown a way to remove deprecated interfaces while retaining back compat - automated tooling to migrate to the next version and give a few versions for a deprecated interfaces to stick around at the source level.
Replies
jjmarr • yesterday at 9:55 PM
C++ almost never removes features because of the ABI compatibility guarantees. Programs compiled with older versions of the standard can be linked against newer versions.
This is allegedly because in the 80s companies would write software, fire the programmers, and throw the source code away once it compiled.
➕ show 1 reply
IcyWindows • yesterday at 10:57 PM
Rust is a single vendor. It's not really the same situation.
➕ show 1 reply
If you're talking about editions, this isn't how they work at all; every edition continues to be supported forever. (The part about automated migration tooling is true, and nice.)
There've been a few cases where code was unsound and should never have compiled, but did due to compiler bugs, and then they fixed the bugs and the code stopped compiling. These were handled through deprecation warnings with timelines at least several months long (Rust releases a new version every six weeks), but usually didn't have automated migration tooling, and didn't fracture the language mostly because they were rare edge cases that most programmers didn't encounter.