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How stable would this interface be? If stability is a concern, exposing a greater surface for user interaction would surely slow down development as these inte
by bentley 4y ago
How stable would this interface be?
If stability is a concern, exposing a greater surface for user interaction would surely slow down development as these interfaces would have to be reworked with care.
If stability is not a concern, then any user tools built upon these interfaces would be subject to breakage at the rate of upstream development. That’s got to be frustrating.
One of the nice things about the POSIX command‐line interface is that the build systems that interact with them know what to expect, because the interface has been much the same for a very long time, while still providing hugely useful capability.
- unixgoddess 4y agoAs stable as, say, golang's standard library. Sure, it needs upfront thinking and commitment, but it's not that difficult and might be well worth it. In the case of coreutils, the problem space is fairly simple and well-understood, so it should be quite easy to commit to a stable interface. Even for something exceptionally complex like a web browser, I'd expect most components to be easily kept backwards-compatible in terms of public api.
- kerkeslager 4y ago> As stable as, say, golang's standard library. Sure, it needs upfront thinking and commitment, but it's not that difficult and might be well worth it. That's actually far less stable than is needed for core utils.