I don’t understand what goes through the developer’s mind. A method is marked as private. It’s documented as not to be used by developers. Further documentation says that using it may break your application in strange ways now or in the future. Despite all this, the developer concludes: “yea, I think it’s a good idea to use this API!” Then, later when something breaks, it’s Shocked Pikachu all around.
> I don’t understand what goes through the developer’s mind.
I'm not defending anyone here, but sometimes it's to work around bugs in public APIs that never get fixed. And sometimes it's because some perceived needed functionality isn't exposed in public APIs.
They figure "It'd be a lot easier to use this private API. We can just fix it if it breaks.", not really realizing the ramifications, for example a lot of apps use older versions of Electron -- some even EOL.
Is the Electron team now going to backport this fix to several versions back? Sounds... involved.
The alternative to using private methods or reflectively mucking about with library/platform internals isn't always "do the same thing but with only public API"; it's sometimes "you can't possibly fix the bug or implement the feature that you want to". It sure does increase maintenance burden though.
So you'd tell customers "No, I'm not fixing that bug because doing so would offend my aesthetic sensibilities. Yes, I know you have a support contract, but I simply refuse to address your problem even though I could"? Or maybe you'd phrase it a little differently in public.
I get it but a lot of the war stories from Raymond Chen's blog https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ were about helping major corporations unscrew something that had relied on a private Windows API because there hadn't been a good way to do it. I would guess most cases of people choosing to rely on a private method are laziness or lack of knowledge about "the right way" (or call it bad documentation), but not 100%.
Discovering and using private APIs is not a walk in the park. I doubt "laziness" is a common motivation for doing so. Lack of knowledge or bad docs, perhaps. But there's often no officially sanctioned way to do something that people want (and perhaps will pay for) - most private API usage I've seen falls into this third bucket.
Laziness comes in many forms. Arguably, discovering and using private APIs is a form of intellectual laziness — it requires you to refuse acknowledging that the whole system is telling not to do things that way.
If you defer to authority. That is, you accept that the people who made the API have the authority to dictate you what you can or can't do on your hardware (or for other people on their), that privating the parts of the API you need was a conscious decision (and not just laziness on their part) and that in general you listen to commands like that.
Even with just a shroud of hacker thinking that is not something programmers should easily accept.
Oh wow, that is the opposite of Hacker Mentality to me. I may question lots of other people, but if some other coder put in the time to construct a well designed API that includes public and private methods, my first thought is never “I know better”. Took me a couple of decades to stop thinking that though, so what do I know?
> // By overriding this built-in method the corners of the vibrant view (if set) will be smooth.
If you don't override the built-in method, the corners won't be smooth. Jagged corners cause thousands of eye injuries every day.
Using (or overriding) private APIs comes with risks, but sometimes it's the only way to get things done. Of course, it comes with consequences too. Sometimes vendors test their new releases with commonly use applications and reach out when they've changed things and breakage results, but testing releases isn't webscale.
Sometimes you just can't achieve something with public APIs. Especially on Apple OSes, they love making genuinely useful APIs private for no good reason while heavily using them in their own apps.
Of course, if you use a private API, you're on your own if your app breaks because of it. I myself have done my fair share of using private APIs on Android. Ideally, you should test your app on beta versions of every upcoming major OS release to make sure it doesn't break. Even more ideally, there's a public equivalent starting with some OS version and you only use the private one until that version, then nothing will ever break.
And there are people who's default setting is to hate/blame Apple because it's fashionable to do so and they are defending not just the use of but also overriding an API explicitly marked as private.
It's not necessarily "blaming", more a combination of:
- Apple released macOS 26
- This version was in testing for many months
- During this time, Apple has apparently not tested how Slack, VSCode, Discord, work
- Or they have, but haven't bothered to reach out to Electron maintainers
- The overriding of the private API was in order to fix a bug with a public one
Combine all of these and there is some onus on Apple for this. If you don't fix your broken public APIs, don't be surprised when people start using your private ones that do work.
But easily the worst point is that QA apparently is limited to their own applications only. Do they really care about the user if they don't test applications found on nearly every mac setup out there? Don't they use Slack internally?!
How come this only surfaces now? Surely large companies such as Microsoft and Slack apparently tested their products that use Electron with the public betas?
It's very hard to notice and very easy to attribute something else. The main symptom is your laptop heating up which is usually attributed to
(1) You just have a slow MacBook, you should get a new one
(2) During beta, "it's a beta and it's expected to heat up and be slow"
(3) People not caring about temps because they use the laptop in clamshell mode
I believe this falls into the perfect definition of "slipped thru the cracks"
Apple has to take some of the blame from this, MacOS without Electron apps is a much less useful proposition. If they knew they were going to change this API in this release it would have made sense to reach out and offer a public way to Electron.
End of the day the needs of users running Electron apps outweighs whatever opinions the internal Apple team has about their APIs
I disagree I think Apple has a responsibility to not break the biggest software used on their platform. They might not like it but I'm sure they'd dislike that software never being there at all even more.
If breaking encapsulation delivers value under the form of features-making-users-happy for a couple years and the fix when it breaks is a matter of a couple weeks (and, like here, a line of code) then it's definitely the right tradeoff
