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Comment by iamwil | Hacker News Reader

What happens when there are upstream changes to the objects? Does everything downstream just need to change, and hence, the upstream objects returned by programs need to be changed with care? Or is it using something like protobuf, where fields are only additive, but never deleted, for backwards compatibility?

Or are the resulting chain of pipes so short lived, it doesn't matter?

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What happens when you rely on non standard behaviour of unix tools, or just non-posix tools that change from beneath you?

I’m not saying that this makes powershell pipes better/worse, just that this problem isn’t unique. Microsoft tends to be reasonably committed to backwards compatibility but I don’t know the answer to the question

I think they were talking about objects at execution time, not version compatibility.

I don’t really understand what this means. The parent specifically writes “backwards compatibility.” The only other thing I think you might be referring to is if the reading process mutates the objects does that somehow affect the writing end of the pipe but I think that doesn’t make sense from a “sane way of doing inter-process communication” standpoint. Is there something else you are referring to? Could you elaborate please?

Powershell is a shell language, everything is dynamic, and does not error when you access a non-existent property on an object.

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