alt Hacker NewsZig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.
Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything, I actually prefer not having to wait through rare major releases to get new language features.
Replies
afdbcreid • today at 4:31 PM
> Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything
Except that means that not only you lose compiler bugfixes, you also pretty much has no access to the ecosystem. For most production codebases, this is a deal breaker.
rwz • today at 4:33 PM
> they want to be able to make breaking language changes
That sounds like it's not ready for production to me.
> Zig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.
This is a solved problem in other projects. Either use the version numbers as intended and bump the major version number on breaking changes, or use Rust-style editions to opt in to the newer versions of the changes.
Calling a project production-ready but keeping the version number below 1.0 and saying breaking changes are expected is a tired game. We've seen it backfire across a number of language projects like Elm, where the exact same claim was used to both encourage people to use it and then blame them when it backfired.
If it's production ready, go to 1.0 and then follow semver for breaking changes. I don't care if we get to Zig v73.2.0 as a result. At least we can see from a glance which versions need to be checked for breaking changes.