Rust Compiler April 2022 Steering Cycle

Apr. 15, 2022 · Felix Klock on behalf of The Compiler Team

On Friday, April 8th, the Rust Compiler team had a planning meeting for the April 2022 steering cycle.

Every fourth Friday, the Rust compiler team decides how it is going to use its scheduled steering and design meeting time over the next three Fridays.

I want to apologize for how late I am posting this message: Our planning meeting was a week ago, and my intent each cycle is to put up this post that day, so that everyone, not just the compiler team members, has a chance participate in the meetings. But, since this is going out a week late, it means one of the meetings already happened (today).

On Friday, 15 April, we discussed salsa 2.0's entity design. Salsa is a generic framework for on-demand incrementalized computation, which has many ties to rustc's query system. Niko Matsakis authored the document that drove the meeting's discussion. The discussion was on zulip, and should eventually be available on Rust's public zulip archive.

On Friday, 22 April, we will be having a meeting to discuss compiler team leadership and succession planning. Leadership of the Compiler Team, and selection of new leads, has thus far been performed in an ad-hoc manner. We will be reviewing a document authored by Felix Klock that tries to fix this by writing down 1. what the leads do today, 2. the minimum we expect from future leads, and 3. what process we should use for selecting new leads.

We are expecting this meeting may not occupy a full hour slot, and plan to occupy any remaining time doing "backlog bonanza", reviewing the list of unimplemented or partially-implemented features.

On Friday, 29 April, we will be having a meeting to discuss the future of Rust's incrementatal compilation. The incremental compilation system has been hard to maintain and hasn't been delivering as much value as we had hoped, at least given the amount of effort that goes into maintaining it. We already had a meeting on Friday, 1 April that looked at our high-level options going forward; this meeting is a follow-up to that, but will now be informed by the aforementioned discussion of Salsa 2.0's entity design, which would resolve some (but not all) of the issues that plague us today.

The three meetings in April each run from 2pm to 3pm GMT.

All of the steering meetings take place on the T-compiler/meetings zulip stream.