Standards are important, especially with computers. Without standards, you end up with crap like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Too little, too late.

And one of the things that’s needed a standard for a very, very, very long time are version numbers. Ever notice some versions for software are like 2019.2.4, while others are like 1.0, 1.1, 0.1, alpha, beta, beta-0rc1, and 89.23x? It’s so confusing to know whether anything is up to date, what you’re updating to, and who is on what. Is version 0.9 of the triangle generator library compatible with version v1.3.0m of the graphics processing library?

Who knows, because everyone just kinda comes up with an arbitrary number to represent the state that their letters of code are currently in.

Fortnite does version numbers like this, while Overwatch does version numbers like… this…

Yeah… I dunno either. Epic Games and Blizzard are both major companies, though. Surely they follow some sort of protocol?

Here’s how Steam does version numbers.

Cool. None. Just a date.

Meanwhile, Google Chrome over here is on version “74.0.3729” currently, so good for them.

Anyway, the point is, there needs to be a standard so that it’s simple and clear to see how much something has updated since your version, what version you have in relation to the latest version, and for simplicity’s sake, not five hundred characters.

Introducing semver.org, it is a global attempt at a standard for software versioning around the world. It’s a simple, clean, and effective method of versioning your software, and since discovering it I have been adopting it into all of my new projects, and as many of the older ones I’m still currently working on as I can. If you want to help, simply go to semver.org, read the rules, and share it with other software engineers.

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Published 2019-05-03 01:25:27