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knorkeryesterday at 4:44 PM2 repliesview on HN

Really? My experience is that of C, C++, Go, Python, and Rust, Go BY FAR breaks code most often. (except the Python 2->3 change)

Sure, most of that is not the compiler or standard library, but dependencies. But I'm not talking random opensource library (I can't blame the core for that), but things like protobuf breaking EVERY TIME. Or x/net, x/crypto, or whatever.

But also yes, from random dependencies. It seems that language-culturally, Go authors are fine with breaking changes. Whereas I don't see that with people making Rust crates. And multiple times I've dug out C++ projects that I have not touched in 25 years, and they just work.


Replies

grey-areayesterday at 5:44 PM

The stdlib has been very very stable since the first release - I still use some code from Go 1.0 days which has not evolved much.

The x/ packages are more unstable yes, that's why they're outside stdlib, though I haven't personally noticed any breakage and have never been bitten by this. What breakage did you see?

I think protobuf is notorious for breaking (but more from user changes). I don't use it I'm afraid so have no opinion on that, though it has gone through some major revisions so perhaps that's what you mean?

I don't tend to use much third party code apart from the standard library and some x libraries (most libraries are internal to the org), I'm sure if you do have a lot of external dependencies you might have a different experience.

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herewulfyesterday at 8:45 PM

Isn't the x for experimental and therefore breaking API changes are expected?