<Darklang year in review - 2021>
# linking-together
m
k
@pbiggar I'm curious how many users Dark has, and how you think about the business case for all the effort poured into bug for bug compatibility.
p
Hey @Kartik Agaram! Good question, one I asked myself many times during the last year 😂. In the last 60 days, 251 people edited code, and 471 canvases had more than 10 requests. The way I looked at bug-for-bug compatibility is that each different thing could cause some edge case somewhere, and that it was hard to enumerate whether those edge cases were ok or not, without doing to work to make it bug-for-bug compatible. There were also some secondary considerations: • learning how to actually keep dark compatibility promises in the long term • learning what rabbit holes existed in the codebase • the “marketing” goals of dark (in particular in https://blog.darklang.com/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms/)
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k
I see, so it wasn't a direct correlation like $X of revenue that couldn't be put at risk.. Could you elaborate on how the 50ms blog post has implications for your own compatibility? The point about learning how to maintain compatibility really resonates! ❤️
p
Oh, there’s $0 of revenue, so there’s $0 at risk 😂
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The 50ms blog post talks a lot about compatibility, and how we were enabling “deployless” and safe continuous delivery by ensuring that things never changed
there’s a heading “new versions of Dark” in particular, but anything in the “versioning” section applies
k
I see! Need to reread it.. 250 edits = 250 deploys, right?
p
yeah, each edit is a “deploy” i guess (though it’s just a DB write)
if you’re asking about the 250 number I used above, that’s total number of people who have edited, not 250 edits
k
Oh sorry, you said 250 unique people edited code. So this could be many more deployments from a customer perspective..
yeah
p
looks like 12219 “edits” in last 60 days
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