Road Map for v0.6.0

[Lakelezz]

This road map organises features that we consider or want to ship with v0.6.0. It's an incomplete collection continuously striving to be updated.

• Proposed are features that could qualify for v0.6.0 but are yet neither confirmed nor implemented.
• Accepted & WIP are features that will ship with v0.6.0 but are still being implemented.
• Implemented are features that are ready to ship and merged (or waiting to be) into v0.6.0.

Serenity v0.6.0-rc.0, v0.6.0-rc.1, v0.6.0-rc.2, v0.6.0-rc.2.1 got released!
v0.6.0-rc.2.1 fixes a fatal bug in v0.6.0-rc.2 related to the attribute driven framework.
v0.6.0-rc.2.1.

v0.6.0 has been released.

Current road map stage:

• Decided on all features to implement.
• Implemented all features.
• Fully updated Rust-code to latest Rust version.
• Decided on final design for Cache and HTTP related API (see: HTTP and Cache Dependency Design #470)
• Finish all TODOs.
• Update all examples and make sure they compile.
• Consider all related PRs:
  • Raw events: Add support for raw events #519
  • Make Error sync: Add Mutex in HttpError to make Error sync again #406 / Make the HttpError Send+Sync #532
  • Modular event-handler: Impl EventHandler for Vec<Box<EventHandler>> #424
• Fix all bugs.
• Update Rust Code.

Updating Rust Code

• As of Rust 1.26.0, pattern matching automatically applies dereferencing, thus we can update our matchs to accept T instead of &T. This is fixed with Update to Rust 2018 #445.
• As of Rust 1.31.0 quite a few changes stabilised. These were adopted with Update to Rust 2018 #445.
• Future-proofing enums and structs to be exhaustively unmatchable and thus gain changeability of public fields without causing a breaking change.
• Consider all Clippy-lints, this also includes reconsidering currently allowed lints. This was done in Conform to Clippy #531.

Accepted & WIP

• MD Book,
  • About: A book about serenity informing users on how to use the library.
  • Location: https://github.com/serenity-rs/book

Implemented

• Support multiple dynamic Prefixes,

  • About: Adds the possibility to define multiple prefixes for a specific runtime determined circumstance (e.g. a specific guild).
  • Breaking: Changes types on public fields and signature of dynamic_prefix, which might be renamed to dynamic_prefixes or will coexist.

• Implementation: Rewrite the framework to attributes (WIP) #458

• Proc-Macro Commands/Framework,

  • About: Fundamentally changes how commands are built by using attributes above functions.
  • Breaking: Builders to create commands will no longer exist.
  • How to upgrade: Port all your commands to attribute-driven commands.
  • Implementation: Rewrite the framework to attributes (WIP) #458

• Nested Groups,

  • About: Allow nesting groups inside groups.
  • Breaking: v0.5.x's CommandGroup exposes all fields as pub and adding a new field would break creation of given type.
  • Implementation: Rewrite the framework to attributes (WIP) #458

• Support sub-groups in the Help-system,

  • About: New command-groups can have sub-groups, which is another group inside a group. This adds support for the help-system to display these in a fancy way.
  • Breaking: Can change output-length of help-command and thus may exceed Discord's limit.
  • Implementation: Rename sub to sub_groups. #539

• Switch to audiopus,

  • About: Switch to audiopus to offer Windows' voice-support and update outdated Opus version.
  • Breaking: OpusError will now yield a different error-enum from audiopus.
  • Implementation: Switch to audiopus #522

• Support Rustls and OpenSSL,

  • About: Switch to Rustls by default and offer a feature to depend on OpenSSL instead.
  • Implementation: Rustls support #457

• Plain-help gets little facelift,

  • About: Readability is improved by underlining topic.
  • Breaking: Underlining increases characters used and may exceed maximum by Discord.
  • How to upgrade: If your help is close to maximum and would exceed, shorten amount of used characters.
  • Implementation: Underline command name and "Commands" in plain help #403

• Slow Mode,

  • About: Allows checking whether current channel is using a per user ratelimit and to set it.
  • Breaking: Both with_embeds and plain need to change their signature to accept a HashSet with related owners.
  • How to upgrade: Add field slow_mode_rate for manually constructed GuildChannels.
  • Implementation: Add Slow Mode Rate #439

• Fix OpenSSL,

  • About: Latest stable OpenSSL version does not build with serenity.
  • Breaking: HyperError has been removed.
  • How to upgrade: Use HttpError instead.
  • Implementation: Switch to reqwest with Replace hyper with reqwest #440 and tungstenite with Switch from rust-websocket to tungstenite #341.

• Builders borrow themselves via &mut self,

  • About: Allows to process a builder without chaining them or binding values again.
  • Implementation: Change all builders to return &mut Self #443 and Change ChannelId's edit-method to expect &mut EditChannel #447

• Use RwLock for ShareMap instead of Mutex,

  • About: In some cases reading from the ShareMap is required only, however Mutex disallows multiple readers.
  • Breaking: lock() is not implemented on RwLock.
  • How to upgrade: All lock()-calls on the ShareMap need to be changed to either read() or write().
  • Implementation: Change Context's lock to ShareMap from Mutex to RwLock #453

• Remove global Cache and HTTP,

  • About: In v0.5.x both can be freely accessed from everywhere. In v0.6.x, these two would be passed around - maybe passed inside Context.
  • Breaking: E.g. ChannelId(u64).say(impl Display) will no longer work, every portion relying on HTTP and Cache as global will break.
  • Implementation: Remove global Cache #448 and Remove global HTTP #456

• Named Checks returning reasoned Errors

  • About: 0.5.x-checks were simply returning a bool to express success and failure, the new checks can store a possible name, help-display-options, help-bypass-option, and return CheckResult to provide an expressive handling of failures (e.g. to log or inform the user).
  • Breaking: The signature of the check function changed.
  • How to upgrade: Make checks return CheckResult instead of bool; they implement From<bool> as well if you do not want to use CheckResult.
  • Implementation: Add new Check System #479

• Update Help-System

  • About: Improve help-system by adding owner-checks, improved checks, ...
  • Breaking: Both with_embeds and plain need to change their signature to accept a HashSet with related owners.
  • Implementation: Add new Check System #479, Add new Check System #479, Improve Help Consistency #485

Bugs to fix before RC:

• Since tungstenite-switch, voice-features encounter frequent disconnects and instability.
  • Fixed in: Voice reconnection pathway impl, and disconnection fixes #444
• VoiceState.channel_id is None: VoiceState.channel_id None when it shouldn't be #513

Declined

• Async serenity

  • Reason: We decided to await async keywords on stable Rust, which won't happen until later this year.

• ETF Gateway Support

  • About: Support ETF instead of JSON to transmit data, see issue ETF gateway support #61.
  • Reason: Not a priority.

• Rework Bucket/Custom Command Rate Limiting,

  • About: Instead of having a simple and complex bucket we should simplify this to one bucket and extend the functionality as well to further tune and adjust.
  • Breaking: Old buckets will no longer exist.
  • Reason: To wrap up v0.6.0's already quite big release, we decided to schedule it for the next fitting release.

[iddm]

Personally, I have made my own stuff for creating extensions for my serenity bot. It allows to dynamically insert or remove extensions (which provide different functionality, commands, and so on) and work within a single bot. It would be nice to provide extensibility in the upstream itself. Though, I guess, this will not land in 0.6 as I think you want to release it quite soon, don't you?

[Lakelezz]

It would be great if we can take a look at it, please share example code or link to your implementation on your fork : )

[iddm]

It would be great if we can take a look at it, please share example code or link to your implementation on your fork : )

Oh, it is not in a fork, it is made on top of serenity's public interface :) And it hasn't been finished yet, I am porting it from my old project (which is private) :)

Currently, there is only a simple "extension" trait and a few impls for it which describe it (name, commands, behavior, and so on) and may be easily plugged in (but statically yet) to a serenity instance.

[fenhl]

I would like to propose modularized event handlers (#488) as a feature to be included in 0.6.

[Lakelezz]

Thanks for all the suggestions - ranging from this issue to our Discord - we decided that to wrap up v0.6.0's feature scope and will no longer accept new suggestions.
If there occurs to be a small issue that can be fixed easily, then sure, we would be willing to sneak that in, but other than that, all 0.6.0 features are listed in the road map.

[AregevDev]

MSVC support for sound feature will be very nice, I can help building the native dependencies

[Lakelezz]

MSVC support for sound feature will be very nice, I can help building the native dependencies

It's already supported on the v0.6.x-branch as shown in the road map under Implemented referring to #522.