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If you're talking about editions, this isn't how they work at all; every edition continues to be supported forever. (The part about automated migration tooling
by ameliaquining 7mo ago
If you're talking about editions, this isn't how they work at all; every edition continues to be supported forever. (The part about automated migration tooling is true, and nice.)
There've been a few cases where code was unsound and should never have compiled, but did due to compiler bugs, and then they fixed the bugs and the code stopped compiling. These were handled through deprecation warnings with timelines at least several months long (Rust releases a new version every six weeks), but usually didn't have automated migration tooling, and didn't fracture the language mostly because they were rare edge cases that most programmers didn't encounter.
- vlovich123 7mo agoEditions are still allowed to remove old syntax or even remove APIs - they only can’t break ABIs. So the code is still there once removed from an edition in previous editions, but such symbols don’t even get linked if they’re unused supporting progressive removal. And similarly, I could see editions getting completely removed in the future at some point. Eg rather than indefinitely maintaining editions, in 20 years have a checkpoint version of a compiler that supports the previous 20 years of editions and going forward editions older than 10 aren’t in the build (for example, assuming a meaningful maintenance burden, which is hard to predict when that happens and what a specific policy looks like).
- ameliaquining 7mo agoEditions never remove APIs.
- vlovich123 7mo agoHave not yet. There’s nothing stopping them though and from talking with the std folks it seems like they will likely at some point experiment crossing that bridge.