Re: A rant about backward-incompatible changes

[Björn Kalkbrenner <terminar@...>]

Hi!

On 14.07.2015 16:35, Simon Cozens wrote:
> On 14/07/2015 23:32, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> > Why does a complex application depend on the version of Lua that end-users have?
>
> Because the application is written in Lua, and uses the Lua interpreter.

Some things i have learned while using Lua is that i can:

- trust Lua's major-minor releases regarding revisions. If the revision 
changes, nothing breaks. Not more or less (better than on other languages).

- find or create compatibility modules (compat-x.y.lua) to be compatible 
to a major/minor jump if i REALLY need this

- can check the version number

- there are few versions as RC which i can try or test if i am 
maintaining a software using Lua

- there are changelogs where such changes are documented

- distributions have slots for the different Lua versions (such as with 
PHP4/PHP5/PHP6) or Python 2.7/3.0/3.2). Comparing, i thing that much 
will break if you are using python2.7 and jumping higher (but i am not a 
python coder). Same with PHP, i had that problem with PHP4 regarding 
references to variables. You are not objective if you are saying "other 
languages take backwards compatibilty seriously". I had that problems in 
bigger scale with PHP really really often.

- write application/user documentation that makes supported versions clear

- it is really nice with Lua to implement dependency startup stuff (take 
a look at prosody as example).

Bye
Björn