Accelerating package expansion in Rust through development of a semantic versioning tool

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of a semantic versioning tool for Rust to prevent incompatible package releases, aiming to improve package management safety and integrate into Rust's standard toolchain.

Contribution

It introduces a new semantic versioning enforcement tool for Rust, addressing a gap in the language's package management and planning integration into the standard toolchain.

Findings

The tool reduces the risk of incompatible package releases.

Plans for integration into Rust's standard development tools.

Enhances safety and reliability of Rust package updates.

Abstract

In many programming languages there exist countless nuances, making developers accidentally release new versions of their packages that are not backwards-compatible. Such releases can directly impact projects which are using their packages, causing bugs or even compilation errors when using the latest version. One of the affected languages is Rust, which also lacks (itself) a built-in mechanism for enforcing semantic versioning. The aim of this thesis is to describe the development of a tool for Rust programmers to reduce the chances of publishing a new version of the code that violates semantic versioning. There are already on-going plans to bundle this tool into the language's standard development toolchain. It would make it commonly used and therefore help users to safely get bug fixes, security patches and new functionality, without worrying about their app being broken by a dependency change.