Unsafe Code Guidelines Meetings

[nikomatsakis]

This thread will track the meetings for Unsafe Code Guidelines effort. These meetings are purely administrative – they are used to decide our overall agenda but aren’t meant to have much technical content per se. The meetings are currently held on Zulip and are publicly accessible, so you can simply click over to view the minutes.

For each meeting, we’ll add a post in this thread with a link to the topic, along with a summary of the key topics discussed.

[nikomatsakis]

2018-08-30

Zulip topic

We discussed this proposal to discuss representation invariants. The conclusion was that the proposal is too broad: we should exclude “validity invariants” and focus purely on representation questions. The decision is to factor the invariant content out and merge the remaining questions, opening appropriate issues. Hopefully this is a good “starter topic”!

[nikomatsakis]

OK, I have created a number of issues relating to data structure representation. I tried to seed the issues with interesting questions, but please feel free to add more!

I’ve been wondering how we are going to go from “questions” to “written text” — I guess I’m imagining we’ll spend some time first trying to suss out the questions and answers and then maybe try to gell and assign people to writing up consensus results etc.

[avadacatavra]

Summary here.

Yay we’re officially (re)launched!

[avadacatavra]

Meeting 1 notes

[nikomatsakis]

Meeting 11 Oct 2018

Zulip thread: meeting 2018-10-11

The main discussion was about how to finish up with the structs+tuples PR (#31). We opted to pull out several “unresolved questions” into sub-issues and call for a “final comment period” on the PR. This means we will merge the PR next meeting, presuming nothing arises.

We also reviewed the assignments for writing summaries of other issues, which hasn’t really happened yet. It seems like it’d be good to get some “fresh blood” to take a look. For reference, here are a list of other issues. For all of them, there is at least some tentative consensus on certain issues, and so it would be great to have people volunteer to write up a PR (similar to #31) that documents what is known and pulls out important unresolved questions. You can kind the list of issues by searching for the writeup-needed label:

• References and raw pointers (#16)
• Fn pointers (#14)
• Unions (#13)
• Enums (#10)
• Integers and floating points (#9)

[nikomatsakis]

Note in particular the request for helpers at the end of that post!

[avadacatavra]

We have another meeting summary!

And a twitter!

[nikomatsakis]

Summary of our latest meeting, from 2019-03-07.

Seems like we had a bit of a lapse!

Also, note that this Thursday we have our first sync with the broader lang team. As part of that, we’ve prepared a report that gives an overall view of what’s happened so far.