On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 01:11:43PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote: > We're going to have one, but it's one of the APIs that we won't guarantee > for the lifetime of Parrot. (The embedding and extension APIs are > guaranteed link-safe forever--extensions built against Parrot 1.0.1 will > run without relinking on Parrot 1.96.33)
Here's how I see it. Until Parrot 1.0.0, the variable-type API will not be even guaranteed sane. I don't think people who aren't core Parrot developers ought to be even *thinking* about adding their own variable types before then. I'm not sure I would even be thinking about adding new vtables before then. :) This gives us the time to experiment, to try out various ideas and see how they work before we have to cast anything in stone. Or at least, in relatively mutable stone. Once we have Parrot 1.0.0, the API may only be broken by new stable point releases; that's to say, after 1.0.x, the development 1.1.x series can break whatever it likes, but that'll become fixed at 1.2.0 and won't change until 1.3.x. You get the idea. That said, I'm not going to break APIs between 1.0 and 1.2 just for the hell of it. Once we get to 1.0.0, certain things will never ever change. -- "Life sucks, but it's better than the alternative." -- Peter da Silva
