Tool to compare public APIs?

help
1

Hi folks.

I have a crate, and I'm worried about backward compatibility when something is changed (e. g. when some type is moved to a different mod but still exported as the previous name).

It would be helpful to have a tool, which exports all signatures of all types and all functions in a simple format: one line — one signature.

So API changes could be inspected with a simple diff invocation.

Something like cargo doc, but much simpler. ( cargo doc uses public type names for displaying types).

I believe something like this already exists. What is this tool name?

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I think all the public interfaces should have some test cases attached to it. Test is a necessary component for reliable software and also has side effect to prevent accidental api breakage.

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It is not practically possible to use tests test to fix public API. Couple examples of situations which can rarely be discovered with tests:

  • type becomes accidentally reexported by two different names
  • functions lifetimes changed so that resulting lifetime becomes dependent on two parameters instead of one
  • function signature is changed so function parameters now requires type to be Sync
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There's GitHub - rust-lang/rust-semverver: Automatic checking for semantic versioning in library crates, does that work for you?

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