On Friday, 9 March 2012 at 22:41:22 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
Most bug fixes are breaking changes. I don't think we are there yet.
In my opinion, this is a very interesting and important observation – due to the powerful meta-programming and reflection capabilities, most of the time the question is not whether a change is backward compatibile or not, but rather how _likely_ it is to break code. There isn't really a good way to avoid that, even more so if your language allow testing whether a given piece of code compiles or not.
A related problem is that we still don't quite have an appropriate language spec, so you can never be sure if you code is really »correct« or if you are relying on DMD implementation details – I'm sure everybody who had their meta-programming heavy code break due to a seemingly unrelated DMD bugfix knows what I'm trying to say…
David
