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Comment by yanis_t | Hacker News Reader

Your regular reminder, that it’s just a regular release, since typescript don’t follow semver. After 4.9 goes 5.0

Is there a reason for this? Why even have the decimal if 4.9 -> 5.0 is just as significant as 4.8 -> 4.9. Just make it v49 -> v50 and remove the ambiguity. What am I missing?

One downside to having a version 4.10 is that some sorting algorithms put this release between 4.1 and 4.2 and not after 4.9.

But yeah, they should just go ahead and follow semver from now on.

Python went from 3.9 to 3.10 some time ago. And many people with YAML-based pipelines found out that 3.10 is turned into decimal 3.1, and ended up trying to build with an ancient version, because quoting was optional (and because YAML is a terrible language).

Same with Go 1.20

https://twitter.com/caarlos0/status/1631635896393932801

Why have decimals at all then? Just increment by whole numbers every release. It's the exact same thing except with the decimal moved over to a sensible place.

From the release notes, it certainly seems minor / backwards compatible.

> 5.0 is not a disruptive release, and everything you know is still applicable. While TypeScript 5.0 includes correctness changes and some deprecations for infrequently-used options, we believe most developers will have an upgrade experience similar to previous releases.

It does have some backwards-incompatibilities, but they're mostly minor/edge-cases

So did the 4.x releases.

It has one of the largest internal rewrites in TS history (namespaces to ESM switch), so it's somewhat incredible its backwards-incompatibilities list is mostly minor/edge-cases.

(Which is to say that Typescript probably couldn't use semver if it wanted to because it has some extreme views on backwards compatibility, but also that this amount of codebase churn is absolutely semver breaking in the strictest semver senses even if it is mostly backwards compatible.)

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