Linux's support for ELF symbol versioning makes maintaining binary compatibility of C libraries easier than perhaps any other platform or language. It's patterned after Solaris' ELF symbol versioning, but more powerful.
glibc uses it extensively, but alas few other people know about it. Theoretically languages, like Rust, which compile to ELF executables could leverage the capability. But none do.
There are a series of posts from a libvirt developer which explain some of the mechanics:
I personally don't bother with semantic versioning at all. Where ABI compatibility matters, I'll commit to maintaining backward ABI compatibility in perpetuity using symbol versioning.[1] And maintaining backwards API compatibility is something I try to commit to as a matter of course; if I can't then I make sure builds will break loudly.
I don't begrudge people using semantic versioning, I don't just don't think it's the best approach for most cases. It's just one of several crappy choices. But at least with C on Linux, ELF symbol versioning is a slam dunk when you're serious about the matter.
[1] I usually avoid depending on proprietary platform features. But this is the one area I'm comfortable and eager to lean on Linux.
