rust-semverver

1) No. I think semver is just fine for its intended purpose. I mean, I'm sure its spec could be improved in various ways, but its fundamental idea seems fine to me. I think it's just important to remember that semver is a means to an end, and not an end itself. It is a tool of communication most useful in a decentralized context. 2) No. 3) See: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-semverver --- But also, this is only ever going to be a "best effort" sort of thing. Semver isn't just about method additions or deletions, but also behavior.

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

Actually, you are wrong in that semver cannot be enforced by tooling. Rust has tooling to automatically enforce semver. For example, this tool: https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/rust-semverver Once you modify a Rust library, it downloads the last released version, compiles it and extracts its AST, and compares it with the AST of the current version. The diff of the two ASTs tells you what the changes are, and there is a Rust book that documents which changes are semver breaking and which aren't. So if you only add a new function to your crate, the tool says that you can bump the semver patch version or minor version, but if you change the name of a public API, the tool requires you to make a new major semver release. Setting this tool in CI is dead easy, and will make your CI fail if a PR changes the API of your crate without properly upd

https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/rust-semverver tries!

Fortunately there are some tools which help you with validating this to prevent accidents. I used https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/rust-semverver some time ago - hope it still works :)

Elm[0], Rust[1] and probably plenty of other languages have "development environments" that enforce the semantic versioning requirements. [0]: https://elm-lang.org/ "Enforced Semantic Versioning" [1]: https://github.com/rust-dev-tools/rust-semverver