[swift] Flatbuffers version changes every time even there is no API / ABI breaks

[mr-swifter]

Hello there!

I'm a bit confused how FlatBuffers version is used and why it changes every release even there is no any breaks
What I'm talking here is about Swift, not sure how it works for other languages.

I moved from using @mustiikhalil repository to main google repository since October, when v22.9.29 has been released. Up until not there are 3 (4 with latest synthetic release) releases. Every release the FlutBuffersVersion constant is changed, so I need:

1. Ge-generate autogenerated source code in all my projects since there is a API break
2. Update flatc my machine (and potentially on all CI host which can have actions for generating flatbuffers source code)
3. Re-compile my source code using new _generated source code

But as I can see there is no API/ABI breaks since the v22.9.29:

~/Dev/flatbuffers/ [master] git diff c92e78a 8f62556 swift/
diff --git a/swift/Sources/FlatBuffers/Constants.swift b/swift/Sources/FlatBuffers/Constants.swift
index 7001e905..5fcb1080 100644
--- a/swift/Sources/FlatBuffers/Constants.swift
+++ b/swift/Sources/FlatBuffers/Constants.swift
@@ -119,4 +119,4 @@ extension UInt64: Scalar, Verifiable {
   public typealias NumericValue = UInt64
 }
 
-public func FlatBuffersVersion_22_9_29() {}
+public func FlatBuffersVersion_22_11_23() {}

Is it intended to introduce API break on every release? If so, is there any proposed workflow to take latest features and optimisations without re-generating and re-compiling everything?

[mustiikhalil]

@mr-swifter Yes, so we decided to go with the following versioning. The idea is we use the date for any release and yes there will always be breaking changes on each release. Since we couldn't just maintain a simple semantic versioning for all the languages. And even if we didn't, each release would've always broke it. since the semantic versioning would always update the function.

[mustiikhalil]

Do you use only the swift library?

[hassila]

Yes.

[dbaileychess]

Yep, we release often and many times there are 0 changes for a given language. But we decided to put the burden on the user to decide when they want to update, instead of trying to manage each language all the time. The less we do with releasing the more features/bugs we can focus on.

[mr-swifter]

Ok, I got you. I will need to think how to handle this one my side! Thanks for reply!