They changed their versioning process to align with Chrome. Chrome 50 == v8 5.0, Chrome 51 == v8 5.1, etc.
Correct.
Major versions make more sense when you create a release based on the content. V8 is creating its releases based on time (~6 week cadence). So a 'major' version is nothing special anymore. In 4.9 we greatly expanded our ES2015 support which was huge but only incremented the minor version because of the same reason.
Disclaimer: I work on the V8 team.
Why not date-based version numbers, then, or as bryanlarsen stated, something obviously meaningless, like the Chrome/FF numbers?
Edit: By the way, sorry to derail the conversation. You guys are doing great work! I'm always excited about V8 updates because they generally mean great perf/feature improvements to both the most popular browsers and my runtime of choice, NodeJS.
The reason is simply 'legacy'. Maybe we will change our version numbers to something without major.minor versions.
Re:V8 Release 5.0 (upcoming)
by TheAceOfHearts on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @10:49AM
(#11290007)
Maybe this is a stupid question... But why not straight up copy Chrome and jump up to v50 instead of v5.0?
Re:V8 Release 5.0 (upcoming)
by bryanlarsen on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @10:18AM
(#11289761)
If you're going to use meaningless version numbers, then it would be better if you used something that didn't imply otherwise. Chrome 50 carries exactly the right connotation, IMO.
Incidentally, I found a nice list of upcoming Chrome/V8 features and status here: https://www.chromestatus.com/features
Perhaps they want to align with Node.js version numbering?
I've always been confused about V8 versioning. Breaking changes appear to come all the time in minor versions.
And there's this note from the release:
> Note: The version number 5.0 does not carry semantic significance or mark a major release (as opposed to a minor release).
So what does it mark? Why 5.0 at all then?