API Stability Debate

Stability is important but less and less people seem to want to run 4 year old software.

Given the long list of "breaking changes" and "Deprecated or removed" I think it is premature to suggest that they are moving towards stability.

I think it is, that is why it is still unstable, 2 majors changes/year.

This is a cultural issue.It's not inevitable that by developing a module over time that you constantly break compability AND you want all people that depend on you to upgrade version.Go encourages the opposite approach.If your API is not stable, don't publish a package for public consumption, or, make sure to clearly mark it as unstable, so people know what to expect.One of the absolute best features of Go is stability. If I have a project written a few years ago, I can alw

Want things to make it into STABLE distros quicker, do not break APIs because the latest bling bling framework/language/whatever got released!

The point is API stability. Not enough people in the JS world care about this.

C is stable. There's a massive difference between a few changes every 10 years and new features every year.

I have found that there are two different ways people think about the word stability:1. A toolchain is stable if new toolchains can still work with older code written for a previous version of the toolchain.2. A toolchain is stable if there is a slow rate of change in the toolchain.It would seem your parent is either in camp #2 or closer to #2 than #1.

That should not be true. 1.0 meant that we stopped breaking things on a daily basis, if your code runs on stable today, it should run on stable tomorrow, modulo any soundness fixes (of which we have had two or three this year, which were all trivial to update).If it is true, please file bugs. We do our best not to break people's stuff, going to pretty extreme lengths compared to many other ecosystems.

Well the title mention unstable software but the article discussed about library or API.Topic wise, backwards compatibility is indeed really important and useful. However to achieve stable API takes long time and effort.You're either use the tooling now and risking changes albeit small (honestly almost everything programming related has breaking changes at one point), or roll your own API.