Show HN: Beef, a new performance-oriented programming language

Re:Show HN: Beef, a new performance-oriented programming lan... by earenndil on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @10:32PM (#21998321)

May I recommend d's scheme? I personally find it works quite well. Essentially, breaking features are introduced as a 'preview' that you have to opt into with a compiler flag. After a period of some time, it is changed so that the old and new behaviours can co-exist, but a deprecation warning is issued where the old behaviour is found. After some more time, the warning is changed to an error, but with an option flag to change it back to a deprecation. Then, finally, it is removed completely for the compiler.

This makes the maintainers' job a bit harder, but not by a lot, and as a user I find it a nice medium of stability and progress.

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Re:Show HN: Beef, a new performance-oriented programming lan... by rmetzler on Thursday January 09, 2020 @11:33AM (#22002587)

I don’t maintain much software with downstream users, but I would expect feature flags like this to make the job also easier for maintainers. It’s a little bit more code, but since you don’t break anything for your users you can take your time and don’t need to rush to push out fixes for new features, since these are opt-in first.

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