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0 pointsapelapan18d ago0 comments

What's the point of a three year window? It seems like a weird middle-point. Either you are in a position to choose/install your own interpreter and libraries or you are not.

If you can choose your own versions and care at all about new releases, you can track latest and greatest with at the very most a few months of lag. Six months of "support" is luxurious in this scenario.

If you can't choose your own versions, you are most likely stuck on some sort of LTS Linux and will need to make do with what they provide. In that case three years is a cruel joke, because almost everything will be more than three years old when it is first deployed in your environment.

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jcattle17d ago

I guess the point of a three year window is to be able as an ecosystem to at some point adopt new language features.

When you have some kind of ecosystem rule for that, you can make these upgrade decisions with a lot more confidence.

For example in my project I have a dependency on zstandard. In 3.14 zstandard was added to the standard library. With this ecosystem wide 3 year support cycle I can in good confidence drop the dependency in three years and use the standard lib from then on.

I feel like it just prevents the ecosystem from going stale because some important core library is still supporting a really old version, thus preventing other smaller libraries from using new language features as well, to not exclude a large user base still on an old version.

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