Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything, I actually prefer not having to wait through rare major releases to get new language features.
This is a solved problem in other projects. Either use the version numbers as intended and bump the major version number on breaking changes, or use Rust-style editions to opt in to the newer versions of the changes.
Calling a project production-ready but keeping the version number below 1.0 and saying breaking changes are expected is a tired game. We've seen it backfire across a number of language projects like Elm, where the exact same claim was used to both encourage people to use it and then blame them when it backfired.
If it's production ready, go to 1.0 and then follow semver for breaking changes. I don't care if we get to Zig v73.2.0 as a result. At least we can see from a glance which versions need to be checked for breaking changes.
on the other hand, a language with frequent breaking changes should not be considered production ready.
people are of course free to live on the edge, and if someone decided that zig is good enough and they are not bothered by breaking changes then they are free to use it for their production system, but that doesn't mean it's ready for everyone. so i prefer the zig approach.
I disagree MIGHTILY. This is how you wind up with C++ and Java.
Languages need to be able to remove features to stay coherent. Occasionally, you get things wrong, it takes time to figure that out, and that's just the way life is.
Except that means that not only you lose compiler bugfixes, you also pretty much has no access to the ecosystem. For most production codebases, this is a deal breaker.
That sounds like it's not ready for production to me.
To me it is not much different from Lua, which despite being on 5.x for decades, makes breaking changes on minor releases (because it predates SemVer).
I also don’t see it being much different from any other language or language runtime that has a major release every year.
It’s fine to update at your own pace.
I did, and I immediately found this in the latest release: https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html#IO-as...
That seems like it would require changing a lot of code. Calling it "production ready" is dishonest at best