[swift-evolution] Incremental ABI stability

Tue Jan 9 20:30:17 CST 2018

I’m just spitballing here, and I’m not an expert on matters of ABI, however
the thought occurs to me that the current all-or-nothing approach might
lead to suboptimal results.

In particular, some recent discussions on this list have mentioned that
certain parts of the standard library, such as Mirror, really ought to be
redesigned. But their current shape is on track to be baked into the
permanent ABI, even though we know right now that we can do better.

Has any consideration been given to the possibility of carving out specific
exemptions to ABI stability for Swift 5, and saying something like, “The
entire ABI will be stabilized, except for Mirror (and possibly a small
number of other things)”?

That way we can nail down almost all of the ABI, while still being able to
fix the parts that we can already see need fixing. Perhaps I am being naive
here, and I’m sure there are major aspects I am unaware of, but from my
layperson’s perspective it seems rather silly to tie ourselves to a legacy
implementation that we want to redesign.

Nevin
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