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Comment by wredcoll | Hacker News Reader

It's rare, I think, for a project to have such a well defined and singular purpose that has not changed in 10 years nor have any bugs been discovered or its dependencies changed underneath it.

It's not impossible, of course, but if I saw even a qr library that hadn't changed in 10 years I would worry that it wouldn't build on current systems (due to dependencies) and that nobody was actually using it (due to lag of bug reports).

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I have several of those projects. I avoid dependencies as much as possible, striving to only use things which I know ship with my target OS. I code for a level of correctness and longevity. That benefits everyone, including myself.

A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.

> A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.

I agree with you - and yet the barcode library I used recently for a variable-data-printing project was last updated 13 hours ago, despite having been around since 2008!

Well said. Even an awesome library with no bugs that has no external dependencies still depends on the stdlib. For a while, before we were using containers, we even had the issue on Mac dev machines especially, where a half dozen Rubygems would crash while building its C extensions if your Mac OS version wasn’t just what the author expected, due to changes in the compiler shipped by Apple. So a MacOS major update might on its own functionally break a gem, even if the gem itself was designed well and you were using the same Ruby version.

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