Thoughts and clarifications

Posted Sep 5, 2024 3:08 UTC (Thu) by legoktm (subscriber, #111994)
In reply to: Thoughts and clarifications by mb
Parent article: Whither the Apple AGX graphics driver?

I agree with mb, "move fast and break things" is not at all how I would describe the attitude of the Rust community. I think people are very intentional about not breaking things and as a result, take a very literal stance with what is a breaking change (see e.g. cargo-semver-checks).

I'd also say that people care a lot about good API design, and as a result iterate (with breaking changes) until they reach 1.0 and then intend to keep it stable forever like serde. If I had to complain about something it's probably that people are, in my opinion, too perfectionist, and don't declare the 1.0 despite their crate being stable. (Of course, I'm also guilty of this in my own crates.)

Thoughts and clarifications

Posted Sep 5, 2024 7:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> If I had to complain about something it's probably that people are, in my opinion, too perfectionist, and don't declare the 1.0 despite their crate being stable.

Indeed, lots of very basic crates are stuck forever at version zero, even such basic crates as libc

> I'd also say that people care a lot about good API design, and as a result iterate (with breaking changes) until they reach 1.0 and then intend to keep it stable forever like serde.

This may be, very well, their intent (and in some rare cases, like with Rust compiler itself, even actual accoplishment), but that's not what developer have to deal with. In the absence of that mythical version 1.0 crate people are forced to use what they have available. And what they have available is, very often, not that bad! For all practical purposes, in a Rust world, version 1.0 is just a number: if crate is version zero crate then minor number work like major number for crates after version 1.0. And it's not as if breaks stops after version 1.0: syn is at version 2.0, clap is at version version 4.5, etc.

And cargo-semver-checks is certainly not unique, that's Rust version of abidiff, essentially.

And it maybe even true that radical and drastic breakages every dozen of years may be harder to deal with than regular and frequent yet minor breakages, but that doesn't change the fundamental approach to how Rust community operates: while many developers dream of replicating the Rust compiler feat of breaking things and moving fast in the beginning while reaching eventual stability, after which development still advances but at glacial speed, but often they only manage to achieve the first part. That's still more honest and better than many C libraries that proclaim to release compatible versions which in reality break programs, but one couldn't claim your are not breaking things if you routinely release new, incompatible, versions while simultaneously stop supporting old versions.