Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by grayhatter 234 days ago
Oh, I guess that's a fair point. I didn't consider the change from `std.fs.openFile` to `std.Io.Dir.openFile` to be meaningful, but I guess that is problematic for some reason?

You're of course correct here; but I thought it was reasonable to omit changes that I would describe as namespace changes. Now considering the audience I regret doing so. (it now does require nhe Io object as well, so namespace is inarticulate here)
2 comments
Ar-Curunir 234 days ago
That is literally a breaking change, so your old code will by definition not work flawlessly. Maybe the migration overhead is low, but it’s not zero like your comment implies
link
bccdee 234 days ago
> I didn't consider the change from `std.fs.openFile` to `std.Io.Dir.openFile` to be meaningful, but I guess that is problematic for some reason?

Because you explicitly said that existing code would continue to work without `std.Io`.

> Code you write tomorrow, will likely have a new Io interface, because you want to use that standard abstraction. But, if you don't want to use it, all your existing code will still work.

I like Zig, but it does not have a stable API. That's just how it is.

link
grayhatter 233 days ago
> Because you explicitly said that existing code would continue to work without `std.Io`.

Because I'm not conflating passing an Io object, (what everyone expects to be mandatory) and existing APIs moving into the Io namespace (an API change that can only be considered significant if you're trying to win an argument on reddit).

These are drastically different changes, and only one can be considered a meaningful change.

> I like Zig, but it does not have a stable API. That's just how it is.

The last 3 minor version upgrades, required a diff in all of my projects. All of them could have been fixed with exclusively sed -i to update namespaces. None of them required real attention, or logic changes.

In one repo I made the namespace changes in isolation. After some time I then went back and rewrote a few blocks to take advantage of the features, runtime speed improvements, and generally improved code quality granted from the new API.

I don't expect zig's API to be stable, and I regret it if my comment gave you a different impression. But I stand by my comments because I respectfully refuse to ignore the pragmatics of using zig. Calling moving a function between namespaces breaking API change can be argued as technically correct, but bordering on being intentionally misleading.

link