Re:Stability by Design
by wereHamster on Friday May 09, 2025 @04:55AM
(#43934986)
To be fair, React itself has been exceptionally stable compared to the rest of the JavaScript / Node.js ecosystem. It's the other packages that are causing build failures, not React. Yes, React did deprecate and eventually remove some features, and those were real breaking changes. But it was at a far lower pace than every other package out there.
I find this to be extremely "it depends": this is a normal interaction amongst software engineers, if you have mature engineers.
It's only not normal in those ecosystems (Everyone knows which ones those are) which appear to have not had adults in the rooms during the design phase.
If you've only been developing for the last decade or so, you may think it's normal that stuff breaks all the time when software is upgraded. If you've been developing since the 90s you'd know that "upgrades brings breakage" is a new phenomenon, and the field (prior to 2014 or thereabouts) is filled with engineering compromises made purely to avoid breakage.
It's why, if I have an application from 10 years ago in React, I won't even try to build it again, but if I have an application from 1995 in C, it'll build just fine, dependencies included[1] (with pages of warnings, of course).
[1] C dependency graphs are small and shallow, because of the high friction in adding third-party libraries.