A lot of our complications for the release come from the fact that Pekko is a library with very strict expectations for binary compatibility (these expectations are inherited from Akka). To put things into perspective, something like ~50-70% of all of the available public interfaces are expected to be backwards compatible. Pekko being written in Scala also does not make things easier (the story is better if we only care about Scala 3 but because of community expectations we are cross compiling from Scala 2.12 all the way to Scala 3).
So while an application (lets say a database) may only have to care about the on-disk and the wire format when it comes to compatibility (to a degree), with Pekko its significantly more. Being a library also means that Pekko can also be used transitively in other projects, further complicating matters. Thankfully as mentioned before the majority of the critical changes that fulfil these expectations have already been done. Aside from further documentation changes and getting the docker release working, the major thing we are waiting for is Scala 3.3 LTS which is expected to come out next week (note that supporting Scala 3.3 LTS has a major impact for Pekko's users and the Scala Center/EPFL, i.e. the people in charge of the Scala language heavily recommended that libraries release with 3.3 LTS). Scala 3 is not forwards compatible, so if we decided to release Pekko before Scala 3.3 LTS we could have caused breakages for our users, whereas Scala 3.3 LTS is expected to create a floor for the minimum supported Scala 3 version within the entire Scala 3 ecosystem. I can say that especially if we are talking about Pekko core, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The inliner is one thing that I would have liked to get out before (see https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/pull/305) mainly because it helps deal with dropping Scala 2.12 (see https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko/pull/281) but it shouldn't block the release. On Sun, May 21, 2023 at 4:48 AM Justin Mclean <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > IMO you are overdue for an initial release and are trying a little too > hard to make it perfect. It doesn’t need to be perfect, each release just > needs to be better than the last. Release early and release often as the > saying goes. > > Kind Regards, > Justin > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > > -- Matthew de Detrich *Aiven Deutschland GmbH* Immanuelkirchstraße 26, 10405 Berlin Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 209739 B Geschäftsführer: Oskari Saarenmaa & Hannu Valtonen *m:* +491603708037 *w:* aiven.io *e:* [email protected]
