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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

React 16?

Anglar 1 was around for a while. There was a big fuss about Angular 2 being incompatible, and before I have had a chance to look at it, we are on Angular 4.

Now we are on React 16.

As if the JavaScript ecosystem wasn't bad enough, we now seem have an extra problem of completely silly release numbers. (I do 80% back end work, but in this day and age its hard not to use JavaScript. I took an interest in these frameworks a couple of years back and didn't gt much chance to follow up since then. Version numbering like this discourage me from finding out more.)

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React has extremely careful versioning with a precise internal definition of what a "breaking change" is. Judging React by Angular's terrible version numbers doesn't seem fair to me.

They're on v16 because they increment the number any time they make a change that isn't 100% drop-in backwards compatible with the previous version, with a deprecation cycle when possible beforehand. Apps that function without deprecation warnings can update immediately when a new release drops.

Ultimately they are where they are because they were of a change they made when they released v15. Really, it's more like v3, but they kept the numbering consistent with how people talked about it. https://reactjs.org/blog/2016/02/19/new-versioning-scheme.ht...

Major version numbers are now actually reflecting major changes. If you're reading an article for React 16 and have strange issues because you're on React 12, it's going to be a lot more obvious than if we're just bumping up minor versions. You can also be more sure that a if you're on 16.0.4, and the article is for 16.0.1 - that you're less likely to run into issues.

It's the same reason chrome is on 62 and Firefox is launching 57 at the end of the month.

Semantic versioning gets bigger numbers faster, but it's better for developers.

If you want to critize JavaScript, you don't have to make things up. It has real flaws.

honestly just caused me to realize I'm not even positive what version my last react app was in.. I thought I was 'current' but I know it was a single digit number so I guess I wasn't.

If it's backward compatible, its not so bad, but whole number releases usually imply that there will be some breaking changes (or they do to me at least).

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