Lang Team Design Meetings

Jan. 10, 2020 · Niko Matsakis on behalf of the language team

Hi all! I wanted to give a quick update about the lang team. We're starting something new this year: a regular design meeting. The idea of the design meeting is that it's a time for us to have in-depth discussions on some particular topic. This might be a burning problem that we've discovered, an update on some existing design work, or a forward looking proposal.

The meetings will be scheduled in advance. Ideally, each meeting should also have a blog post before-hand giving background material, although that may be difficult to achieve in practice. Similarly, after each meeting, we'll typically post minutes and a recording, and ideally try to write up a summary blog post with major points. (Sometimes recordings are hard to achieve, either for technical reasons or because we wanted the ability to discuss more sensitive topics.)

The meetings are open for anyone to listen in and attend. They generally take place on Mondays at "noon Boston time" -- but for the precise scheduling you should check the lang team calendar. We'll try to keep the calendar up to date with the topic to be discussed in each meeting, as well. Meetings might not happen every week, if we don't have a topic in mind.

First design meeting

Our first design meeting was actually last Monday! We discussed the soundness hole that was found some time ago in Pin. You can read the minutes from our discussion and a recording is also available. You might also find it easier to read the comments in the internals thread. The good news is that we seem to be centralizing on a solution based on negative impls.

Next design meeting

The next design meeting will take place this coming Monday. The topic will be how to fix rust-lang/rust#57893, which is a soundness bug related to dyn types. There is a prepared writeup describing the problem and a possible solution to guide the meeting. It is maybe worth noting that one of the proposed solutions involved a Rust 2021 edition as well (although there are smaller, more targeted fixes that do not require a new edition).

Design meetings after that

The next two weeks are likely to not have design meetings:

  • January 20th is Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the US.
  • January 27th is the Mozilla All Hands.

As a result, in both cases, many of the lang team members will be unable to attend.