LDWG meeting minutes, November 5, 2018

We have resumed the language design working group meetings. There were 12 participants in the Zoom online meeting.

The regular meetings will occur on the first Monday of every month at 1:30 PM Pacific time. In case the Monday is an important holiday the meetings will be moved to the second Monday of the month. The changes will be announced using the P4-design mailing list.

We have listed all the proposed additions and changes to P4-16 v1.1 on the P4-spec LDWG page. Each language feature that is being considered must have an "owner". The owner is responsible for making progress on the issue: scheduling the discussion, writing supporting documentation, e.g., spec, use cases, test cases, leading the discussion on the issue.

In this meeting we have made a list of open issues and some people have claimed ownership.

Ready for review: structure field overlays: https://github.com/p4lang/p4-spec/pull/656, and computed bit-widths: https://github.com/p4lang/p4-spec/pull/641.

@jnfoster has an alternative P4 language parser; he is considering open-sourcing it so it can be integrated in the P4 test suite. The tool has already helped uncover several bugs in the spec and implementation, which have been fixed.

@cc10512 has offered to add support for versioning in the compiler implementation.

We have talked about specifying the open-source compiler intermediate representation more precisely, to enable people to more easily write new backends for the open-source compiled. The IR is documented to some degree (using the compiler-design document and Doxygen comments) but it is not clear whether this is sufficient. Chris Sommers will take ownership of this issue.