Perl Developers Actively Care About Backwards Compatibility | Hacker News Reader

Perl Developers Actively Care About Backwards Compatibility

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24 pointsacqq9 comments

Perl 5 was released in 1994. The current production version of Perl is 5.12. You can really consider Perl 5 as something very, very stable by now.

The difficulty maintaining Perl comes from the large number of modules that will only work with the perl version it was compiled with. A module might work with any version 5.8 or later, but only one version at a time. So if you upgrade perl on a system, you'll have to re-install the module from CPAN as well.

You mean XS modules, and any well-written XS module should be binary compatible with any other point release. That is to say, if you compiled an XS module against Perl 5.10, it should work unchanged with Perl 5.10.1.

The article to which this one is a response, has exactly the opposite point of view:

http://perl-yarg.blogspot.com/2009/06/darkpan-schmarkpan-sto...

As, to some extent, does a followup from another developer:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/39228?from=rss

I suggest an alternative title for this post: "Some Perl Developers Care About Backwards Compatibility (While Some Don't Give A Hoot And Others Just Try To Keep Up With Conflicting Needs)".

There's big difference: those who care actually develop Perl (like, they maintain the C kernel of the language etc.), and those that don't just use Perl and just make noise and are clueless outsiders looking for attention.

Edit: I don't count as outsiders or anything anybody who is a Perl contributor and has his own opinion! Not everybody is supposed to have same opinion, and even when people do cooperate it's a part of the process! My personal belief is still that Perl 5 aged more gracefully than a lot of projects!

That's... quite a claim. I'm hardly the only contributor to Perl 5 who thinks that the obsession over backwards compatibility with an unknowable and unmeasureable DarkPAN is unhealthy.

Oh, sorry! I wanted to refer only to the guy who wrote the schmpan text who apparently wasn't contributor but was making noise!

I immediately withdraw my claim and beg for forgiveness from everybody who does contribute but have the opposite opinion!

nperez (author of the darkpan-schmarkpan post) may not be a contributor to p5p (Perl core language developers' mailing list), but a quick glance at http://search.cpan.org/~nperez/ shows that he's contributed some interesting code to the POE and Moose codebases. I think Rafael was a bit harsh in his "Perl Developers Actively Care..." post when he seemingly dismissed the opinions of anyone who doesn't contribute sufficiently good patches to p5p.

I'd characterize these posts as "Last year, Perl developers and users debated the relative merits of backwards compatibility vs. innovation". All of the participants care about backwards compatibility, just to differing degrees. Keep in mind, Perl had just had its first major release in 5 years, and was starting to have more frequent major releases; there's been lots of discussion of how Perl should evolve.

Another long thread discussing the same question: http://use.perl.org/~educated_foo/journal/38525

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