The Node library is massive, and tightly coupled to V8.  The changes that bumped the major version weren&#x27;t major changes for most people, just for those who happened to be using the parts of the library that changed.  Maybe that&#x27;s a deficiency in semver (or the way io.js used it), but going to v4 in one year isn&#x27;t as unstable as it sounds; it&#x27;s just following Chrome&#x27;s example of not caring how big the version number gets, so long as the semantics make sense.<p>I believe the io.js community was in the &quot;ship or get off the pot&quot; camp, and found it silly that Node was a critical piece of infrastructure at firms like PayPal while still technically not having had a GM release.  By forcing the issue, they got Joyent to commit to major version changes twice a year, which sounds like a reasonable compromise between everything-changing-all-the-time and we-can&#x27;t-have-new-things-because-legacy.