I Optimized My Bump Version Tool and Made It 1,000,000x Faster Than Its Python Counterparts.

A developer rewrote the bump2version version-bumping tool in Rust, releasing version 0.2.1 with a branchless lookup-table design, SmallVec-based version storage, and memchr-based scanning. The release adds file watching, manifest auto-detection, and support for pyproject.toml, pom.xml, and go.mod, and benchmarks claim roughly 1,000,000x faster parse-bump-serialize than the Python bump-my-version CLI when counting subprocess and interpreter startup overhead.

Hello again, fellow Rustaceans, Pythonistas in denial, and the three people on earth who genuinely enjoy reading version bumper release notes 👋 If you were here for my last post, where I rewrote bump2version https://github.com/c4urself/bump2version in Rust and declared it ~10,000x faster than the Python CLI, you may recall that I ended it with a vague threat about future benchmarks. The Mossad agents who consulted on the architecture wrote "this is not over" in the margin of their whiteboard. I ignored it. I should have listened. Because in the weeks since that post, I went back in. Deep in. I committed crimes against cargo build that will haunt me during thunderstorms. I --release 'd things that should not be --release 'd. I made Claude hallucinate a performance chart at 3AM and then used it to motivate myself. The result: bump2version 0.2.1 https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/releases/tag/v0.2.1 . Now 1,000,000× faster than its Python counterparts. Yes, I am counting subprocess overhead. The Soviet material resurfaced. It always does. Let's get into it. Because 0.2.0 shipped, and I immediately opened my Gmail inbox. The audacity of the open-source community. The audacity, bro I build something 10,000x faster and within days there are requests. "Can it watch files?", "Can it detect which manifests I'm using?", "Can I run it in the browser?", "Can I use it with Go?", "Can I use it with Java?", "Can my Ruby project use it?". I ain't got no time for this. I need to take a little break and play CS2 with the boys I looked at these emails. I looked at the ceiling. I looked at my coffee. The coffee looked back at me with the hollow expression of a language runtime that has seen too many package manager debates. And then I cracked my knuckles and got to work. I thought I was done with the Mossad agents after 0.2.0 . I was not. They came back. Same 3AM knock. Same whiteboard. But this time they brought slides. Twelve of them. With bullet points. And speaker notes. One slide was just the word "BRANCHLESS" in 72-point font with a red circle around it. Their new requirements: memchr .contains in a loop like an animal", SmallVec Vec<u8 for three numbers major, minor, patch is an insult to modern CPU cache lines. if major { ... } else if minor { ... } nonsense. One lookup table. One store. Done. Cargo.toml like it's the only file in the world", they observed, correctly. "What about pyproject.toml ? pom.xml ? go.mod ? Are Go developers not also suffering?" They are. They are very much also suffering. I implemented every point. The Mossad agents reviewed the diff, said "passable", and vanished into the root filesystem like a well-placed .gitignore entry. Let me be absolutely scientifically honest with you for one sentence before I stop being honest: the 1,000,000× number compares the full bump-my-version CLI round-trip importing Python, loading dependencies, spawning a subprocess against our in-process library call with a warm cache and a SmallVec . One is a sports car. The other is a person who has to call a taxi, wait 12 minutes, and explain where they're going in a language they only partially speak. Now let's look at the real numbers. 0.2.0 vs 0.2.1 vs Python | Operation | bump2version 0.2.0 | bump2version 0.2.1 | Python pyO3 FFI | bump-my-version CLI | |---|---|---|---|---| | Parse + bump + serialize | ~57 µs | ~0.4 µs | ~79 µs | ~585 ms | | File search/replace 1k lines | ~65 µs | ~11 µs | ~1.7 µs | ~590 ms | | File search/replace 100k lines | ~4.2 ms | ~0.9 ms | N/A | ~600 ms | | Config file parse | ~800 µs | ~140 µs | N/A | ~500 ms on import | Versus the Python CLI subprocess: 500 x 1000 ÷ 0.4 = ~1,250,000× faster for a version parse-bump-serialize. We round down to 1,000,000x for humility. The Mossad agents said rounding up was acceptable. We preferred honesty. strchr and it is unreasonably good at its one job. SmallVec< VersionPart; 8 Arc<Regex cache bump --watch --bump patch It sounds simple. It was the opposite of simple. "Just watch a file and re-bump when it changes", I told myself, in the tone of a man who has never used inotify https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inotify.7.html before. Bro, I used inotify . Or rather, notify-rs https://github.com/notify-rs/notify used inotify for me, which is almost the same thing except someone smarter than me had already suffered through the Linux kernel filesystem event API so I wouldn't have to. God bless crate authors. Watch mode works like this: --watch flag. bump registers a recursive file watcher on all files listed in your .bumpversion.toml . current version . This is either extremely useful for local development workflows or a deeply irresponsible footgun. We ship tools for adults. The lock safety is your problem. Watches VERSION, Cargo.toml, and README.md for changes, auto-bumps on save bump --watch --bump patch --config-file .bumpversion.toml Oh no did I just? yes, yes you did. It already ran. watch Detected change: Cargo.toml watch Bumping patch: 0.2.1 → 0.2.2 --detect Is Doing God's Work Previous bump2version was Rust-centric. You gave it files, it bumped files. Very obedient lil tool. Very rigid. Like a Rust compiler, actually. The new --detect flag changes all that: bump --bump minor --detect This single command: target/ , node modules/ , .git/ , etc. setup.cfg , package.json , build.gradle , Gemfile Six languages. One command. cd my-monorepo bump --current-version 0.1.0 --bump patch --detect --dry-run detect dry-run Would update: Cargo.toml detect dry-run Would update: pyproject.toml detect dry-run Would update: package.json detect dry-run Would update: pom.xml detect dry-run Would update: go.mod detect dry-run Would commit 5 file s : 0.1.0 → 0.1.1 Full supported matrix: | Language | Manifest Files | |---|---| | 🦀 Rust | Cargo.toml | | 🐍 Python | pyproject.toml , setup.cfg , setup.py | | 🟨 JavaScript / Node.js | package.json | | 🐹 Go | go.mod | | ☕ Java | pom.xml , build.gradle , build.gradle.kts | | 💎 Ruby | Gemfile | The Go developers, in particular, messaged to say thank you. We thanked them for using Go despite everything. Every language now has a working example under examples/ https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/tree/main/examples , each with its own pre-baked .bumpversion.toml . Python project bump --config-file examples/python/.bumpversion.toml --bump patch --dry-run dry-run Would commit 2 file s : 0.1.0 → 0.1.1 Node.js project bump --config-file examples/nodejs/.bumpversion.toml --bump minor --dry-run dry-run Would commit 1 file s : 0.1.0 → 0.2.0 Java Maven project bump --config-file examples/java/.bumpversion.toml --new-version 2.0.0 --dry-run dry-run Would commit 1 file s : 0.1.0 → 2.0.0 Ruby gemspec + Gemfile bump --config-file examples/ruby/.bumpversion.toml --bump major --dry-run dry-run Would commit 2 file s : 0.1.0 → 1.0.0 The "bump everything at once" grand finale cd examples/multi-lang bump --current-version 0.1.0 --bump minor --detect --dry-run detect dry-run Would update: Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, package.json, pom.xml, Gemfile, VERSION 6 ecosystems. 1 tool. Still forbids unsafe . We have standards. You ever look at a perfectly good CLI tool and think: "This would be better if I could bump versions from a browser"? No? Me neither. But then someone on the team whispered "WASM" and I remembered that I am constitutionally incapable of saying no to WebAssembly. So now there is a Yew-based web application at examples/yew-app/ https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/tree/main/examples/yew-app . It: wasm32-unknown-unknown , no server required version ops.rs And yes, git -related features had to be extracted into an optional feature flag git because gix uses Unix-specific APIs that don't compile to WASM. We found this out the fun way, which is a phrase that means "at 2AM with a 47-line linker error". You may recall from my previous post that I abused Claude during 0.2.0 development. My lawyer said not to bring it up again. So I won't bring up the fact that during 0.2.1 development, I made ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini: detect.rs walk implementation 7 times until it correctly skipped node modules without accidentally also skipping node modules backup important distinction SmallVec< VersionPart; 4 for typical semver usage it is 8 , empirically The OpenAI, Anthropic and Google lawyers have upgraded from "concerned" to "a medium-sized incident report has been filed". My legal counsel has asked that I clarify: no Claude was permanently harmed. Tokens were consumed. Electricity was used. The --detect flag works correctly. After cargo install bump2version --features rust-binary , you get three things: | Binary | Use case | |---|---| | bump | The modern, primary CLI | | cargo-bump | Cargo subcommand cargo bump --bump patch | | bump2version | ✅ Backward-compatible alias for old CI configs, tutorials, and the 47 blog posts that told people to run bump2version --bump patch | The bump2version binary is not deprecated. It is not going anywhere. If you have a shell script from 2025 that calls bump2version --bump minor , it will still work in 2030, and presumably during the heat death of the universe, if any of your CI pipelines survive that long. This was a deliberate choice. Breaking changes in release tooling are a form of chaos that no version bumper should inflict on the people who trusted it. All of these do the exact same thing: bump --bump patch cargo bump --bump patch bump2version --bump patch kept for backward compatibility The config file now tracks all version-carrying files in the project , not just Cargo.toml : bumpversion current version = 0.2.1 commit = false tag = false bumpversion:file:Cargo.toml search = version = "{current version}" replace = version = "{new version}" bumpversion:file:package.json search = "version": "{current version}" replace = "version": "{new version}" bumpversion:file:README.md search = "{current version}" replace = "{new version}" bumpversion:file:RUST.md search = "{current version}" replace = "{new version}" bumpversion:file:WASM.md search = "{current version}" replace = "{new version}" bumpversion:file:DOCKER.md search = {current version} replace = {new version} bumpversion:file:PACKAGING.md search = {current version} replace = {new version} bumpversion:file:rpm/bump2version.spec search = Version: {current version} replace = Version: {new version} One bump --bump patch and every single version string, across docs, code, configs, packaging specs, and Docker manifests, updates atomically. The Mossad agents reviewed this config and said "acceptable" which, from them, is essentially a standing ovation. There is a moment in every Rust developer's life, we all know the moment, where you look at a piece of code that should work, that does work in your head, that you have drawn on paper with arrows and boxes to prove its correctness, and the borrow checker looks at you across the compiler output and says: error E0505 : cannot move out of 'watcher' because it is borrowed And then below that: note: the borrow later used here And then below that , a footnote that reads note: move occurs because... followed by a chain of reasoning so long it wraps around to the next terminal page. The Yew WASM integration did this to me for different reasons: gix depends on Unix syscalls openat , statx , platform symlink handling that simply do not exist in wasm32-unknown-unknown . The linker error was 47 lines long and named three crates I had never heard of. The fix: gating all git-related functionality behind a git feature flag that is disabled by default for WASM builds. Clean. Simple. The kind of solution that is obvious in retrospect and invisible before you spend four hours in the linker output. features default = "std", "git" git = "gix", "std" cli = "clap", "git" rust-binary = "cli", "git", "detect", "watch" ← full featured binary watch = "notify", "cli" detect = "walkdir", "cli" The WASM app uses none of the git features. The CLI binary uses all of them. The feature graph is clean enough that my Mossad advisors called it "elegant" before immediately asking about the benchmark numbers. The complete CLI, with everything cargo install bump2version --features rust-binary This gets you bump , cargo-bump , and bump2version . All 3. No choices required. Just install and bump. Standard semver bump --bump patch 0.2.1 → 0.2.2 bump --bump minor 0.2.1 → 0.3.0 bump --bump major 0.2.1 → 1.0.0 Safe preview bump --bump patch --dry-run bump --bump minor -n same thing, shorter Git integration bump --bump patch --commit --tag Custom message bump --bump minor --commit --message "chore: ship {new version} 🚀" Auto-detect all manifests bump --bump patch --detect Watch mode exits when you ctrl + c bump --watch --bump patch std required for the core dependencies bump2version = { version = "0.2.1", default-features = false } use bump2version::{config::BumpConfig, version::{parse version, bump version, serialize version}}; let cfg = BumpConfig::default ; let v = parse version "1.2.3", &cfg .unwrap ; let v2 = bump version &v, "minor", &cfg .unwrap ; assert eq serialize version &v2, &cfg , "1.3.0" ; pip install bump-rs python from bump rs import bump version print bump version "1.2.3", "major" "2.0.0" in ~57µs npm install bump2version js const { bumpVersion } = require "bump2version" ; console.log bumpVersion "1.2.3", "patch" ; // "1.2.4" Look, at some point the law of diminishing returns kicks in. We cannot make version bumping faster than the speed of light. We checked. We asked the Mossad agents. They checked their slides. The answer was no. But there are things we can still do: alpha.1 → alpha.2 → beta.1 → rc.1 → stable lifecycle, first-class detect targets .NET .csproj , PHP composer.json , Swift Package.swift , Elixir mix.exs If you want any of these sooner: open an issue https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/issues . Or just star the repo and the moral pressure will accelerate delivery. It works on me. I've tested this empirically. bump2version 0.2.1 started as a performance exercise and became an ecosystem. What was a single binary is now: no std support for the core bump-rs for Pythonistas who want the speed without the syntax cargo-bump , bump2version cargo install bump2version --features rust-binary → bump → ship → repeat → be 1,000,000× faster than Python → sleep → repeat 🦀 bump2version is the world's fastest version bumper written entirely in 100% safe Rust , with no std support, native Python and Node.js bindings, and a cargo bump subcommand 🗿. | Platform | Command | |---|---| | Rust binary | cargo install bump2version --features rust-binary | | Cargo subcommand | cargo bump --help | | Docker | docker pull wiseaidev/bump2version | | Debian/Ubuntu | Download .deb from GitHub Releases https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/releases | | RHEL/Fedora | Download .rpm from GitHub Releases https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/releases | | Windows | Download bump.exe from GitHub Releases https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/releases | | GitHub Action | See action.yml https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/blob/main/action.yml | | Python | pip install bump-rs | | Node.js | npm install bump2version | Note Installing via cargo installs both bump and bump2version binaries. The original bump2version binary is retained indefinitely for backward compatibility with existing tutorials, CI/CD pipelines, and automation scripts. bump2version automates semantic version management for any project regardless of language. It: major.minor.patch . major , minor , patch , or… Star the repo https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version . Try the Python bindings https://pypi.org/project/bump-rs . Use the Node.js package https://www.npmjs.com/package/bump2version . Read the Rust docs https://docs.rs/bump2version . Poke the WASM demo https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/tree/main/examples/yew-app . Run the examples https://github.com/wiseaidev/bump2version/tree/main/examples . This has been a public service announcement from a developer who, in the course of a single engineering session, created 20 tests, 7 example projects, a WASM frontend, a Soviet-themed benchmark suite, and consumed an amount of Claude tokens that my accountant has asked me not to disclose. The legal proceedings with Top Tech companies remain ongoing. My lawyer has read this post. He has asked me to note, for the record, that "abusing Claude" is a colloquial and affectionate term and not a legally actionable description of token consumption. I have not taken that advice either. Till next time: Keep bumpin', keep rustin', keep benchmarkin' 🦀⬆️ P.S. The Mossad agents have approved this post subject to the removal of the classified section about the branchless arithmetic lookup table. We kept it in. They know. They've said nothing. This is ominous.