Skip to content

Add type system docs 2025h2 goal #314

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
Open
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
39 changes: 39 additions & 0 deletions src/2025h2/typesystem-docs.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
# Type System Documentation

| Metadata | |
|:-----------------|----------|
| Point of contact | @BoxyUwU |
| Teams | |
| Task owners | @BoxyUwU |
| Status | Proposed |
| Tracking issue | |
| Zulip channel | N/A |

## Summary

Improve documentation of type system components to aide in types team onboarding and communication about changes to the type system .

## Motivation & Status Quo

The type system is a very complex and critical component of the compiler. It is currently lacking in documentation, and the documentation that *does* exist is often inadequate for gaining a thorough understanding of a given part of the type system (or simply outdated as it was written many years ago).

The lack of documentation makes onboarding difficult for new contributors and require a lot of energy from experienced contributors who are now responsible for explaining everything from scratch themselves. A similar problem also occurs when reviewing changes to the type system, as there is no documentation it can be difficult to bring everything back into cache and be confident that the subtleties of the area being changed have all been taken into account.

### The next 6 months

- Compile a list of type system concepts then compare that against the in-compiler documentation and the rustc-dev-guide's type system chapter to find weak points in our documentation.
Copy link
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Will this be made available somewhere? Either posted on the types team repo? o perhaps a tracking issue? or open up (best) individual tracking issues? I think we should do that.

Copy link
Member Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I would expect to put a summarized list in the project goal tracking issue, and then also have associated issues in the dev guide repo tracking each individual topic/area 🤔 Having stuff in the types repo may make sense too though

- Document existing known weak points:
- How const generic arguments are type checked
- The design of the new solver and how/why it differs from the old solver
Copy link
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Nice


### The "shiny future" we are working towards

All type system components should be thoroughly documented. Contributors should not find themselves in a position where knowledge of the type system is *only* attainable by speaking with types team members instead of having readily available documentation to read.

## Ownership and team asks

| Task | Owner(s) or team(s) | Notes |
|------------------------------|---------------------|-------|
| Triage Analysis Chapter | @BoxyUwU | |
Copy link
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Suggested change
| Triage Analysis Chapter | @BoxyUwU | |
| Discussion and Moral Support | [Types] | |
| Triage Analysis Chapter | @BoxyUwU | |

| Const Generics Documentation | @BoxyUwU | |
| New Solver Documentation | @BoxyUwU @lcnr | |
Loading