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by cjalmeida 1138 days ago
Counter anecdote, I had to go back to a quite complex project that a was developed in 1.5, 3 years ago, hundreds of dependencies.

Upgrading to 1.9 RC2 required changing a single dep (Light raps to the drop-in Graphs) and a single line (a library changed the return from a String to a StringView)
1 comments
cookieperson 1138 days ago
You're incredibly lucky. Even minor version bumps have left me up shit creek in production with deadlines.
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cjalmeida 1138 days ago
Julia core is backwards compatible all the way to 1.0, libs not so much.

Now, something as fundamental as numpy dropped support for Python<3.6 in a minor release: https://numpy.org/devdocs/release/1.19.0-notes.html

And I've been bitten by relevant python libs breaking stuff even in patch releases.

It happens and it's far from particular to Julia. I just make sure to test stuff property before going to production.

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cookieperson 1137 days ago
Pythons breakages have also been security centric. I'm not a big fan of it, but yea Julia isn't 30 yrs old and it's done things like this every minor release without anouncement. To be clear though I'm not talking about a conscious researchable decision to drop support after 5 years. I'm talking about bugs that pop up over night. Anyway has Julia ever been audited for security? Most of the netstack was written by a single person... Makes ya wonder...
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freilanzer 1138 days ago
Why do you update a programming language version in production with deadlines in the first place?
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cookieperson 1138 days ago
Because it has a new feature that's save the day(if it worked), fixes bugs in a janky patched Julia version, and production in the data science world looks different in research and development phases then it does for software. Production in r and d can simply be, boss wants to see the pros and cons next week with a successful run. Only with Julia have I run into these kinds of predicaments
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dunefox 1138 days ago
Other languages and libraries break as well so that's just bad practice.
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cookieperson 1137 days ago
Not as frequently. Having a broken release for a programming language is also bad practice.
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cookieperson 1137 days ago
Look at the backlog of issues in their GitHub for backports. You'll see detailed lists of reported and fixed breakages. The lists aren't small... Now go on to imagine the ones people don't report and instead patch and fix them locally. We aren't even talking about Julia code fixes, often these involve the C that creates it and are a nightmare to diagnose. I can't reply to your post unfortunately the thread is too long.
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dunefox 1137 days ago
How exactly are Julia releases broken?
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