ezyang's blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

2018/02

Semantic Import Versioning in the wild

The best and worst thing about semantic import versioning is that it makes BC-breaking changes hard.

In the past few days, Russ Cox has made a splash in a series of white papers describing Go and Versioning. In them, he coins a new term, Semantic Import Versioning, distilling it to the following principle:

If an old package and a new package have the same import path, the new package must be backwards compatible with the old package.

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