Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

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I'd say it's less about bureaucracy and more about what the .NET team has to consider when they make sweeping changes.

Backwards compatibility, security, edge cases, downstream effects on other libraries that are reliant on LINQ, etc.

One guy with an optional library can break things. If the .NET team breaks things in LINQ, it's going to be a bad, bad time for a lot of people.

I think Evan You's approach with Vue is really interesting. Effectively, they have set up a build pipeline that includes testing major downstream projects as well for compatibility. This means that when the Vue team build something like "Vapor Mode" for 3.6, they've already run it against a large body of community projects to check for breaking changes and edge cases. You can see some of the work they do in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvjOT7NHl4Q

I think this approach predates Vue.

I know of two examples:

1. Fedora in collaboration with GCC maintainers keep GCC on the bleeding edge so it can be used to compile the whole Fedora corpus. This validates the compiler against a set of packages which known to work with the previous GCC

2. I think the rust team also builds all crates on crates.io when working on `rustc`. It seems they created a tool to achieve that: https://github.com/rust-lang/crater

I would assume the .NET guys have something similar already but maybe there’s not enough open code to do that

Rust also has the advantage of having no ABI. Binary interface is a whole lot more difficult to maintain than code interface.

C# has multiple technologies built to deal with ABI (though it probably all goes unused these days with folder-based deployments, you really need the GAC for it to work).

IIRC perl tested new releases by running all the unit tests in the CPAN library, waaaaay back when.

They still do and investigate each failure. If the end result is that the library is “wrong” tickets and patches get sent to the library maintainers.

You have to add an extra function call at the start of the Linq method chain in order to make it zero-allocation. So I don't think it would break backwards compatibility. But adding it does create an additional maintenance burden.

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