The impl period newsletter, week 1

The impl period

One week ago, the “impl period” formally launched, with 35 initial workgroups! We have a global Gitter channel (with IRC bridge) and dedicated channels for each working group.

It’s worth repeating that this effort is intended for people with all experience levels and interests — there really is something for everyone, and the WG leads are putting a ton of work into mentoring. So if you’ve ever thought it might be fun to contribute to the language or any of its surrounding infrastructure: now’s the time. If you’re not sure what working group is right for you, drop by the main chatroom and introduce yourself, and we’ll help you find your way!

Recap from week 1

In our first week, we saw an steadily-increasing amount of activity on both Gitter and the relevant repos. Fortunately, folks seem to be attracted to working groups in a relatively balanced fashion: no group has gotten totally overwhelmed with volunteers, and most groups have had at least some activity.

We’ve seen by far the most activity around the compiler working groups; it’s already getting hard to keep the pipeline of unassigned issues full! Probably the single biggest piece of news is that tschottdorf has a PR with a near-complete implementation of improved match ergonomics. Way to go!

A few people had some issues with Dropbox Paper, a collaboration tool many of the subteams have used in the past. Please let me (@aturon) know if you are having ongoing issues here, or problems with Gitter.

Groups that need some love

Late in the week, we launched another working group, led by @QuietMisdreavus: WG-docs-checklist, a group dedicated to completing areas of the standard library that aren’t yet up to our documentation standards. Come help us make std docs shine!

Beyond that, there were a few groups that didn’t see much attention last week, and would love to see some volunteers:

  • WG-libs-openssl, a group working to drastically improve the docs of one of the most important dependencies in the Rust ecosystem.
  • WG-libs-simd, a group building the components needed for using SIMD (vector instructions) on stable Rust. If you want to see Rust utterly dominate the benchmarks game – or you just want Rust’s access to hardware to be more complete – this is the group for you.
  • WG-docs-rustdoc, a group working to improve today’s rustdoc, making the documentation experience better across the board.
  • WG-dev-tools-IntelliJ, a group working to improve the already amazing IntelliJ Rust plugin.
  • WG-cargo-native, a group building a declarative story for specifying native (e.g. C) dependencies for Rust crates. Critical for Rust interoperability!
  • WG-infra-perf, a group improving our compiler performance tracking, and thus helping accomplish one of our most critical goals this year.
  • WG-infra-crater, a group working to make Crater (our ecosystem testing tool) more reliable, more parallel, and more accessible. Rust core developers depend on Crater on a weekly basis, but it remains very arcane to use.

Jump on in!

Shoutouts

To close out, here is a (partial!) list of shoutouts to folks participating in the impl period so far. It doesn’t have all the working groups yet, but leads are encouraged to follow up in the comments!

It’s hard to keep track and coordinate across 35 working groups, so if something is missing, or if you’ve been involved and aren’t on the list — please mention that in the comments!

WG-core-site

WG-libs-guidelines

  • @crlf0710 for ongoing work on one of the hardest guidelines — trait naming
  • @mgeisler for all the help with build issues and speeding up our Travis build by a factor of 4

WG-libs-simd

  • @gnzlbg for lots of work adding intrinsics and participating on the issue tracker.
  • @alexcrichton for adding an amazing test harness for SIMD codegen tests.

WG-libs-cookbook

WG-compiler-errors

WG-compiler-middle

WG-compiler-NLL

WG-compiler-traits

WG-dev-tools-bindgen

WG-docs-rustdoc

WG-infra-secure

  • @voteblake dove right in and started building a threat model, as well as getting a handle on the infrastructure situation over all.
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Note: there’s also some exciting opportunities with the Neon project!

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I want to add another shoutout, for the incredible internal documentation work @nikomatsakis and others have been doing to prep rustc for the impl period.

Question: is Cargobomb out, Crater in again? I was under the impression that Cargobomb would supercede Crater.

Look like the new crater is cargobomb, renamed. GitHub - rust-lang/crater: Run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem! redirects to GitHub - rust-lang/crater: Run experiments across parts of the Rust ecosystem!, whose README says “successor to GitHub - rust-lang-nursery/taskcluster-crater

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WG-infra-crates-io

A bunch of the issues with the WG label, both mentor and needs-mentor, have to do with frontend HTML/CSS/JS. Some have a Rust component as well as a frontend component. For web developers out there, IMO these issues are a great way to ease in to working on a Rust app-- they involve setting up the app locally, then working on something familiar to get to know the codebase a bit, and then you can choose to get to know the Rust backend :slight_smile: I’m working on adding more Rusty issues to the WG label with instructions, but in the meantime these frontend-ey issues are a great way to get going :slight_smile:

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Yes, one of the first items for this working group is to get all documentation to refer to crater (again)!

This might be worth an announcement. I only guessed by seeing the github redirect happen.

What are those WG links supposed to do? When I click one it opens Dropbox but gives me a “forbidden” error.

Bah! These are all pages we're using to give background and pointers for getting involved, and to record completed work items.

I've heard of people having issues with the Dropbox app -- have you tried this from a desktop?

Just tried it on the desktop in a browser and it displayed as expected. You seem to be right that it’s something specific to the Dropbox app on iOS. Thanks!

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More news: Diesel has joined the impl period!

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