[LLVMdev] [RFC] Developer Policy for LLVM C API

[Juergen Ributzka]

Hi @ll,

a few of us had recently a discussion about how to manage the C API and possible policies regarding addition, maintenance, deprecation, and removal of API.

Even thought there is a strong agreement in the community that we shouldn't break released C API and should be backwards compatible, there doesn’t seem to be a developer policy that backs that up. This is something we should fix.

I was wondering what the interested parties think of the current approach and what could/should we improve to make the use and maintenance of the C API easier for users and the developers alike.

I was hoping we could also introduce a process that allows the removal of an API after it has been deprecated for a whole release and the release notes stated that it will be removed.

Thoughts? Comments?

Cheers,
Juergen