Poll: what minimum and maximum version of Elixir are you still actively developing on?

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What is the MINIMUM version of elixir you actively develop with?

  • 1.5.x or lower
  • 1.6.x
  • 1.7.x
  • 1.8.x
  • 1.9.x
  • 1.10.x
  • 1.11-dev

0 voters

What is the MAXIMUM version of elixir you actively develop with?

  • 1.5.x or lower
  • 1.6.x
  • 1.7.x
  • 1.8.x
  • 1.9.x
  • 1.10.x
  • 1.11-dev

0 voters

I’m partially asking to inform my understanding of what Elixir versions are actively in use, because that partially determines the versions that we want to support for ElixirLS (which currently supports 1.7+).

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Security patches cover 5 latest minor versions so perhaps that’s a reasonable threshold for libs?

So 1.6 as the earliest supported version currently.

2 Likes
3

Hmmm, that is a good consideration for libraries. I would say that would be a very safe minimum to choose. I can’t see much argument for supporting/having documentation for a version lower than that.

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Given that Elixir may be moving to longer release cycles, I wonder if a time horizon would be a better guide than a specific number of minor releases. I think expecting devs to be within 2 years of latest is quite reasonable, regardless of how many minors are released in that span.

3 Likes
5

I agree that it’s a reasonable limit for commercially supported projects. However, a big part of Elixir ecosystem, Elixir-LS included, is supported by the community. The authors are under no obligation to support such a wide range of Elixir (and OTP) versions. Doing so, in case of Elixir-LS and elixir_sense, is especially painful as those projects use a lot of internal APIs. Each Elixir release introduces a handful of breaking changes there.

1 Like