wtf is rs-semver?

rs-semver is a replacement for the popular semver npm package, the small library many JavaScript projects use to compare version numbers like 1.2.3 and decide whether one version satisfies a range like ^1.2.0. It keeps the exact same function names and behavior as the original package, so it is meant to be dropped into an existing project without changing any of your code, but the actual comparison work happens in Rust instead of JavaScript regular expressions. The reasoning behind it is that version comparison work, especially checking many versions at once or sorting long lists, is the kind of task that runs faster in Rust than in plain JavaScript once you are dealing with a lot of versions, such as a package manager working out an entire dependency tree. The author measured this directly against the original semver package on the same machine and found meaningful speed gains for checking whether versions satisfy a range and for sorting, though parsing individual versions one at a time actually turned out slower because of the overhead of passing data between JavaScript and Rust. The README is upfront about this tradeoff rather than hiding it. Beyond the Node package, the project also ships a command line tool with the same flags as the original semver CLI, and a separate, standalone Rust code library that works without Node.js at all, for anyone who wants to use the same logic directly from a Rust program. The author checked the whole thing against the real semver package's own test suite, using its actual test data rather than a small set of examples, and reports that everything passes. A handful of rarer features are intentionally simplified compared to the original, and these differences are marked directly in the source code. There is no browser version yet, and prebuilt binaries do not yet cover every operating system and processor combination. The project includes automated testing and release pipelines, though a few platform builds, like older Intel Macs, are deliberately left out for now.