The active discussion is still Data Representation. It seems like we’re ready for writeups for the following issues:
- structs and tuples: niko
- references and pointers: avadacatavra
- function pointers: nicole mazzuca
- packed/align: <this could be you!>
We’re still looking for a consensus/further discussion on:
If you’re interested in working on a writeup, please comment on the issue. I’ll be adding some tags to help us organize this. See zulip for the full log.
Overall, it seems like the github discussions are productive. However, there’s the question of how we produce concrete summaries/writeups/more permanent artifacts (aka how are we actually writing this reference book?).
Who/what/why/when/how of writeups
We should designate people responsible for writeups earlier. This is also a place where we should reach out to members of the community who might be interested/involved in topics elsewhere, but not necessarily aware of the discussions occurring here.
The writeups should reflect whatever consensus was reached in the GH issue—someone will summarize the discussion and open a PR on the mdbook in the repo. We can then iterate on the PR with comments/reviews/suggestions. If needed, we can always merge a starting point PR (for documentation and revisitation) or close a PR if it looks like the topic needs more discussion.
So, what do I mean by consensus? We don’t need to agree on what the answer is, but we should agree on what the questions are. Some things to think about:
- how is this topic currently handled? is this appropriate?
- what are different approaches and tradeoffs?
- what do people need to keep in mind when dealing with this topic?
- if there isn’t necessarily a right way, is there a wrong way?
We’ll see how this writeup process goes and document it once something seems like it works.
- Oops! We forgot to add a license.
- Start writing up the Data Representation chapter
- Do we want to say anything about other representations (e.g.
Box, slices, fat pointers…) - Should we have an ABI section
- Do we want to say anything about other representations (e.g.
- Keep discussing topics that aren’t ready for writeups
- Figure out how to do writeups more effectively