← Back to context

Comment by Animats

6 months ago

> I guess you worry that the feature creep dilutes the maintainers' focus, but opening it up to a broader audience might get access to more contributors.

To some extent, yes. Here's an example.[1] So many features have been added that the unit tests were taking too long. So tests were switched to use a faster allocator. That won't even compile for cross-compilation from Linux to Windows.

Because tests won't run, chasing down other cross-compilation bugs got much harder.[2]

This is the price of feature bloat. Core stuff is breaking and not getting fixed as cool features are bolted on. Currently, 799 open bugs. The technical debt is building up.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/7033

[2] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/6847

3 comments

Animats

Reply
bunderbunder  6 months ago

It reminds me a little bit of the inescapable lifecycle of a ticketing system:

  1. People love it because it's lightweight and fast.
  2. More and more people use it.
  3. Feature requests start to roll in.
  4. It becomes bloated and slow.
  5. People get fed up and start to hate it.
  6. Create a new ticketing system and return to step 1.

  • diggan  6 months ago

    Maybe we should just learn to live with that sort of things, and build a tool/product that works with that cycle in mind and offers it as a feature.