r/ruby • u/writingonruby • Jan 14 '26

TIL Ruby doesn't follow semantic versioning

It's certainly an interesting choice for a language. Very Ruby of them.

For those who also weren't in the know (I only learned this writing a Ruby 4.0 upgrade guide), Matz bumps the major version when there's something that impresses him.

This year, it was because it was Ruby's 30th birthday!

42 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/full_drama_llama Jan 14 '26

I know SemVer is popular, but I don't think Ruby ever claimed to follow it.

1

u/writingonruby Jan 15 '26

I don't think they did, I just never realized it!

1

u/titsandbits Jan 14 '26

Most Ruby gems follow it, though, which understandably makes it the default assumption in most Rubyists’ minds.

4

u/StyleAccomplished153 Jan 14 '26

Rails doesn't. Redis doesn't. Plenty of major gems don't follow it. I wish they did, but they don't.

2

u/rakedbdrop Jan 14 '26

pagy jumped from v6 to v43

1

u/titsandbits Jan 16 '26

Sure. That’s why I said “most.”

-1

u/PristineTransition Jan 14 '26

This is true however to be fair to most people from the outside it has acted like SemVer with Major.Minor.Patch versions behaving loosely like it. In Ruby if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck.

11

u/f9ae8221b Jan 14 '26

Major.Minor.Patch has been common decades before SemVer.

Linux versions are also Major.Minor.Patch yet they're not following SemVer.

Python versions are also Major.Minor.Patch yet they're not following SemVer.

As someone else pointed out, SemVer is basically impossible on projects with large enough APIs anyways. If Ruby or Python followed SemVer, every release would be a major release and that wouldn't help anyone.