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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

That's why other spaces have machine tools for this. There seems to be an overall drift in Python to use more type annotations anyway; making a tool that compares 2 versions of a package isn't rocket science (maybe it already exists?)

Literally everyone posting here is using a system built on compatible interfaces. Stable DLLs on Windows, dylib framework versions on OSX, ELF SOversioning on Linux.

It's clearly not impossible, just a question of priorities and effort, and that makes it a policy decision to do it or not. And I'll lean towards we've been shifting that policy too far in the wrong direction.

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The only reason DLLs are stable on Windows is that every application now ships all the DLLs they need to avoid the DLL Hell caused by this exact thing not working.

I look forward to you demonstrating your tool that can check if two python packages are compatible with each other, maybe you can solve the halting problem when you're done with that?

I'm not a Windows developer, you'll have to excuse my ignorance on that. Pretty sure you're not shipping user32.dll with your applications though.

Also, I didn't claim any tool would give a perfect answer on compatibility. They don't for ELF libraries either, they just catch most problems, especially accidental ones. The goal is 99.9%, not 100%. Just being unable to solve a problem perfectly doesn't mean you should give up without trying.

Windows kept system libraries stable and modern software does a lot to avoid them with abstractions on top because they are unpleasant to use.

You could call that success but I think it’s just an extra layer of cruft.

> I'm not a Windows developer, you'll have to excuse my ignorance on that. Pretty sure you're not shipping user32.dll with your applications though.

Microsoft's famously terrifyingly large amount of engineering work that goes into maintaining backwards compatibility to allow you to run Windows 3.1 software on Windows 11 is certainly impressive, but maybe also is the exception that proves the rule.

> Just being unable to solve a problem perfectly doesn't mean you should give up without trying.

Currently no one can solve that problem at all, let alone imperfectly. If you can, I'd gladly sponsor your project, since it would make my life a lot easier.

I think it'd be near impossible to guarantee API compatibility, regardless of type hinting. E.g. if a function returns a list, in a new version I can add/remove items from that list such that it's a breaking change to users, without any API compatibility issues

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