Announcing the "impl period", Sep 18 - Dec 17!

[aturon]

@hjr3

Where is the info on the tokio/futures 0.2 revamp?

Nothing much has been written up yet, but what I'm hoping to see includes:

• Drastically simplifying the story around Core/Handle/Remote, potentially providing global event loops and the like.
• Focusing Tokio more purely on "mid-level" async IO, rather than the current focus on tokio-proto; essentially, breaking up the stack a bit to have greater focus for each piece.
• A complete revamp of the documentation, in line with the above, and also providing reams of examples.
  • As part of this, I'd like to see some documentation introducing futures via async/await syntax to start.

I'm not sure how all of this is going to turn out, but these are at least the high level concerns I have in mind. More details around the impl period!

@djc

Longer term, do you feel that the distribution of 75% focus more on design, 25% focus more on implementation is the right balance?

I think that's not the right way to understand what's happening; there's been quite substantial focus on implementation work throughout the year (e.g. on incremental compilation, NLL, library work, etc). To me, it's more a matter of having a clear cutoff point for major RFCs that will "make it" for the year, and providing an opportunity for us as a community to change gears for a bit.

By contrast, closing down the RFC process for more than a quarter of the year feels a bit too strong to me.

But in any case, we'll know more by the end of the year, and can take that into account when planning next year!

@djc

In terms of evaluating the roadmap position, do you feel that the roadmap tracker repository has satisfied the goals/plan for it as set in the beginning of the year? If I look at the libs/lang roadmap issues right now, they don’t necessarily look all that well-aligned to the projects you’ve mentioned here.

So the team roadmap issues have not been kept up to date. By contrast, the project roadmap issues (e.g. ergonomics) has been.

On the whole, I'd say that the tracking repository has been a mixed experience, and we may want to try a different approach next year.

@jimmycuadra

Will this be exclusively for 2017 roadmap items? Any chance of seeing forward progress on the never type and/or the TryFrom trait?

Roadmap items are prioritized, but we continually accept other RFCs and stabilizations. I think TryFrom is plausible, but the never type is less likely this year (because it hit on substantial thorny implementation issues, and does not merit the time needed at this point).

@jimmycuadra

Something I hope to see discussed in December for next year is how to better pace both planning and implementation over 2018. I think it’d be great if there was a more steady pace of things being stabilized over the year, rather than the heavy planning and last minute rush to implement and stabilize that we’re seeing this year.

Hm, so to clarify, the impl period is about implementation, and very much not stabilization! As I said above, it's a misunderstanding to think we've waited until this point to do any implementation work; it's been happening continuously. This is more about recognizing a point in the year where further design work on the roadmap is no longer feasible, and we should focus wholly on completing implementation work that was already ongoing.

With respect to the timeline: certainly going forward I would expect to have more of the "seasons" of the year set in advance. The idea of the impl period was something that occurred to us relatively recently, hence the somewhat late announcement. As with all Rust processes, expect iteration and experimentation!

@withoutboats

I don’t think its a rush, but I do think our process this year has been a bit ‘waterfall’ and there are probably learnings to improve it next year. I’d like to see more eRFCs, for example.

Yes, in general the RFC process is currently calibrated too far on the waterfall side. That's one among many improvements that'd be good to make around RFCs going into next year.