Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
dtolnay
semver-trick
Rust2018–2026
dtolnay / semver-trick
semver-trick
How to avoid complicated coordinated upgrades
12Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
573GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
How to avoid complicated coordinated upgrades
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year13 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-02-23 15:48:52 UTC to 2026-04-13 19:11:33 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesN3n3t·Dec 29, 2021Submission
2 points · Open discussionThat's a way to avoid complicated coordinated upgrades across the ecosystem if certain conditions are met.
It's called the "semver-trick" [1].
[1]: https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick
In This Year in Embedded RustThe JVM is 114MiB on my machine. A near-minimal ggez program in debug mode is about 100MiB,¹ and ggez is small for a Rust application library. When you start getting into the 300s of dependencies (i.e. every time I've ever got beyond a trivial desktop application), you're lucky if your release build is less than 100MiB.
Sure, I could probably halve that by forking every dependency so they aren't duplicating versions, but that's a lot of work. (It's a shame Rust doesn't let you do conditional compilation based on dependency versions, or this would be a lot easier. As it is, we have to resort to the Semver trick: https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick/ — not that many people do that, so it's functionally useless.)
Take GanttProject as an example. It's 20.6MiB of files, plus the JVM. I challenge any of you to make a Rust version (with acces
Read the rest
sibility support in the GUI) that can open (something resembling) its XML files and draw some (vague graphical Proof of Concept) representation on the screen (with editable text fields), in less than 114+21=135 MiB of binary. And then tell me how, because I've been trying to do that kind of thing for over a year.
¹: I can get it down to around 8MiB with release mode, lto etc., but that significantly increases the build time and only about halves the weight of the intermediate build files.
There's been a lot of attention given to this in Rust:
- Defining semver requirements for the ecosystem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41185023/what-exactly-is...
- There's also a library that attempts to automatically check sermver adherence of a crate: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-semverver
- And there has been quite a bit of effort into preventing semver requirements from fracturing the ecosystem. This revolves around the compiler working with multiple major versions of a single library: https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick
In Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You