[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Mark Lentczner]

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:36 AM, Adrian May
<adrian.alexander.may at gmail.com>wrote:

> I suppose I did miss the point of the platform: I was trying to build it,
> which requires at least part of the platform.


This is not for the faint of heart. Like *ALL* language distributions I
know (C++ included), boot-strapping the next rev is never easy. Consider
building the stdc and stl for version gcc x with gcc x-1 - Or trying to
assemble and test packages for python 2.x with only python 2.(x-1)

 just a bit of common sense instead of this bloodbath.


Now you're being hysterical. The changes don't rise to that level at all.
Vast swaths of haskell code have continued to work just fine over the last
many years of changes. And many more have continued to work with only
minimal maintenance.

The changes over the last several years are no more extreme than I see in
other systems. Consider that Mac OS X ships with Python2.5 and 2.6 and 2.7
all installed because of incompatibilities in the base set of libraries.

If you are comparing it C++ library stability you are being myopic: The
situation in C++ system libraries was so complex that it spurred the
monster that is autoconf! That the most common libs have settled into a
very stable set that can be expected to work over several years and major
releases, has only been true in the last decade. The prior three decades of
C (and later C++) were filled with tons of this sort of
versioning difficulty, compounded by multiple systems.

- Mark
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