Assigning version numbers to EVM changes

[axic]

Motivation

To have consistent and simple way referring to EVM versions in clients and tools.

Specification

A limited subset of semantic versioning (semver) is introduced for EVM versions. Only a major and minor version numbers are used, patch level is omitted.

In the past, almost each hard fork made a breaking change (and thus introduced a new major bump) to the underlying EVM implementation, but this is not necessarily a requirement for future hard forks.

The past changes are versioned as follows:

• 1.0 - Frontier
• 1.1 - Homestead (+ EIP7)
• 2.0 - EIP150.1c ("all but one", OOG changes)

EVM version identifier

The #154 proposal can be extended to include the above version numbers in a binary format. A straightforward way is to store major and minor as an 8 bit value each. Setting certain restrictions would allow to pack them into a single 8 bit value.

[chfast]

Can wasm-like prefix be used. I.e. 4 bytes "\x00evm" + 4 bytes little endian version number?

[github-actions]

There has been no activity on this issue for two months. It will be closed in a week if no further activity occurs. If you would like to move this EIP forward, please respond to any outstanding feedback or add a comment indicating that you have addressed all required feedback and are ready for a review.

[github-actions]

This issue was closed due to inactivity. If you are still pursuing it, feel free to reopen it and respond to any feedback or request a review in a comment.