<div dir="ltr">Ah, I see. I understood on a basic level that additive features were safe, but I didn't/don't have the knowledge to judge when adding actually means changing (e.g. idk, 'adding abstract classes' or 'adding optional protocol methods' implying 'changing/breaking inheritance/dispatch' or something..).<div><br></div><div>Anyway, I didn't know that about C++ – now <i>that's </i>a reassuring benchmark. Thanks! ;)</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 8:46 PM, Chris Lattner <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:clattner@nondot.org" target="_blank">clattner@nondot.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class=""><br>
> On Aug 4, 2017, at 12:03 PM, Mathew Huusko V <<a href="mailto:mhuusko5@gmail.com">mhuusko5@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
><br>
> Thanks for the swift response, it's an honour; I agree wholeheartedly with your logic and sentiment. Sorry if I was unclear, but my concern/curiosity is not for the speed of Swift's development, but in fact for its long term evolution and longevity. At risk of repeating myself/boring everyone, that concern manifests over two intermingling phenomena:<br>
> 1) in the evolution email/proposal archive, a well intentioned (towards -complexity and +quality) but sometimes blasé air around potential uses/requirements of the language (~"Swift won't support that because people probably wouldn't use/need it").<br>
> 2) the reality of the clock, or what I think/thought the reality was. Obviously I don't want Swift to evolve too fast, and don't think having any particular feature right now is worth risking that, but won't the ABI be stabilised eventually (Swift 5?) and then it will actually be too late for some features?<br>
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</span>No. ABI stability is less of a bound of new things than it is a bound on the ability to change existing things.<br>
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To take one random example, C++ has been ABI stable on the Mac since effectively 10.0 (or whatever release first shipped GCC 3). That hasn’t impeded the ability to add tons of new stuff to C++. :-)<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
-Chris<br>
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