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13 pages tagged with "semver"

SemVer in Rust: Tooling, Breakage, and Edge Cases — FOSDEM 2024

March 18, 2024 - 10726 words - 54 mins

Last month, I gave a talk titled "SemVer in Rust: Breakage, Tooling, and Edge Cases" at the FOSDEM 2024 conference.

The talk is a practical look at what semantic versioning (SemVer) buys us, why SemVer goes wrong in practice, and how the cargo-semver-checks linter can help prevent the damage caused by SemVer breakage.

TL;DR: SemVer is impossibly hard for humans, but automated tools can cover our greatest weaknesses. read more

Four challenges cargo-semver-checks has yet to tackle

January 23, 2024 - 2117 words - 11 mins

My last post covered the key cargo-semver-checks achievements from 2023. Here are the biggest challenges that lie ahead!

Many of the remaining challenges in cargo-semver-checks are obvious: we all want more lints, fewer false-positives, etc. etc. Let's set those aside.

Instead, let's talk about four non-obvious challenges we have yet to tackle:

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Highlights of 2023 for cargo-semver-checks

January 16, 2024 - 1679 words - 9 mins

2023 was a big year for cargo-semver-checks! We saw ecosystem-wide adoption in projects of all shapes and sizes: the tokio and PyO3 ecosystems, company-backed OSS projects from companies like Amazon and Google, and even in cargo itself. Here's a look back at the highlights of 2023!

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Checking semver in the presence of doc(hidden) items

November 18, 2023 - 2882 words - 15 mins

cargo-semver-checks v0.25 squashes nearly all bugs related to doc(hidden) items — its most common source of false-positives. What does doc(hidden) mean in Rust, and why was handling it correctly so hard?

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Semver violations are common, better tooling is the answer

September 07, 2023 - 3270 words - 17 mins

This post is coauthored by Tomasz Nowak and Predrag Gruevski. It describes work the two of us did together with Bartosz Smolarczyk, Michał Staniewski, and Mieszko Grodzicki.

Anecdotally, cargo-semver-checks is a helpful tool for preventing the semver violations that every so often cause ecosystem-wide pain. This is why it earned a spot in the CI pipelines of key Rust crates like tokio, and also why the cargo team hopes to integrate it into cargo itself.

While anedotal evidence is nice, we wanted to get concrete data across a large sample of real-world Rust code. read more

Breaking semver in Rust by adding a private type, or by adding an import

May 08, 2023 - 3718 words - 19 mins

A few days ago, I started polls on Mastodon and Twitter whether adding a new private type, or an import, can ever be a major breaking change. The consensus was that this should be impossible.

I agree with that. It should be impossible.

I've discovered a way to cause a previously-public type or function to disappear from a crate's public API by making innocuous-seeming changes like adding a private type or adding an import, etc. It is not a hypothetical problem, either — I've found at least one real-world Rust project that has been affected by it.

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Re-exporting an enum with a type alias is breaking, but not major

March 06, 2023 - 813 words - 5 mins

We've already explored some of the dark corners of Rust semantic versioning on this blog:

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Speeding up Rust semver-checking by over 2000x

February 07, 2023 - 3926 words - 20 mins

This post describes work in progress: how cargo-semver-checks will benefit from the upcoming query optimization API in the Trustfall query engine. Read on to learn how a modern linter works under the hood, and how ideas from the world of databases can improve its performance.

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Moving and re-exporting a Rust type can be a major breaking change

January 31, 2023 - 1194 words - 6 mins
I recently embarked on a quest: revamp the cargo-semver-checks import-handling system so that moving and re-exporting an item stops being incorrectly flagged as a major breaking change. This is how crate authors can reorganize or rename items: just re-export the items in the original location under … read more

Some Rust breaking changes don't require a major version

January 26, 2023 - 1848 words - 10 mins
I've been saying for a while now that semantic versioning in Rust is tricky and full of unexpected edge cases. My last post mentioned that some Rust structs can be converted into enums without requiring a major version bump. It introduced a non-exhaustive struct called Chameleon that had no public f… read more

Turning a Rust struct into an enum is not always a major breaking change

January 24, 2023 - 1611 words - 9 mins
EDIT: The Rust API evolution RFC distinguishes between breaking changes and changes that require a new semver-major version (called major changes). All major changes are breaking, but not all breaking changes are major. Changing a struct to an enum is always breaking (as pointed out on r/rust) but i… read more

cargo-semver-checks today and in 2023

December 23, 2022 - 1946 words - 10 mins
cargo-semver-checks ends 2022 with 40,000 downloads from crates.io, able to prevent 30 different kinds of semver issues, and having done so in real-world use cases. Inspired by Yoshua Wuyts' "Rust in 2023 (by Yosh)" post, here are my thoughts on cargo-semver-checks in 2022, and what I look… read more

Toward fearless cargo update

August 25, 2022 - 1866 words - 10 mins

I recently built cargo-semver-checks, a linter that ensures crates adhere to semantic versioning. This is why and how I built it.

Fearless development is a key theme throughout Rust. "If it compiles, it works", fearless concurrency, etc.

But there's one aspect of Rust (and nearly all other languages) that isn't entirely fearless yet: cargo update, upgrading the versions of the project's dependencies.

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