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In theory it should be possible for a package manager to check the public API for obvious breaking changes and throw an error if the major version has not changed.

Its been done as a research project [1] but I don't think it has been done in any major language or package manager.

[1] https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8456/pdf/OASIc...

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Elm enforces this since 2014 at the package manager level. They are able to do this because since the language is pure, the compiler knows if a function's signature has changed. If you are changing implementation details that don't affect data transformation, then that would just be a dot release. I haven't actually published an Elm package, but from what I've read this seems like a great setup.

Function signature is only half the battle. The semantics can change without the signature changing. This could be caught by a unit/functional test, but then you'd have to have 100% semantic interface coverage. Which is not quite worth it for most libraries/packages.

`rust` has `semverver`, but it doesn't always compile

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