I want to write about an idea that Josh Triplett and I have been iterating on to revamp the lang team RFC process. I have written a draft of an RFC already, but this blog post aims to introduce the idea and some of the motivations. The key idea of the RFC is formalize the steps leading up to an RFC, as well as to capture the lang team operations around project groups. The hope is that, if this process works well, it can apply to teams beyond the lang team as well.

I would like to describe an idea that’s been kicking around in my head. I’m calling this idea “shepherds 3.0” – the 3.0 is to distinguish it from the other places we’ve used the term in the past. This proposal actually supplants both of the previous uses of the term, replacing them with what I believe to be a preferred alternative (more on that later).

Caveat

This is an idea that has been kicking around in my head for a while. It is not a polished plan and certainly not an accepted one. I’ve not talked it over with the rest of the lang team, for example. However, I wanted to put it out there for discussion, and I do think we should be taking some step in this direction soon-ish.

I have been thinking about how language feature development works in Rust¹. I wanted to write a post about what I see as one of the key problems: too much concurrency in our design process, without any kind of “back-pressure” to help keep the number of “open efforts” under control. This setup does enable us to get a lot of things done sometimes, but I believe it also leads to a number of problems.

On internals, I just announced the formation of the language-design team meta working group. The role of the meta working group is to figure out how other language-design team working groups should work. The plan is to begin by enumerating some of our goals – the problems we aim to solve, the good things we aim to keep – and then move on to draw up more details plans. I expect this discussion will intersect the RFC process quite heavily (at least when it comes to language design changes). Should be interesting! It’s all happening in the open, and a major goal of mine is for this to be easy to follow along with from the outside – so if talking about talking is your thing, you should check it out.

In my previous post, I talked about the idea of mapping the solution space:

When we talk about the RFC process, we always emphasize that the point of RFC discussion is not to select the best answer; rather, the point is to map the solution space. That is, to explore what the possible tradeoffs are and to really look for alternatives. This mapping process also means exploring the ups and downs of the current solutions on the table.

In the talk I gave at Rust LATAM, I said that the Rust project has always emphasized finding the best solution, rather than winning the argument. I think this is one of our deepest values. It’s also one of the hardest for us to uphold.

Let’s face it – when you’re having a conversation, it’s easy to get attached to specific proposals. It’s easy to have those proposals change from “Option A” vs “Option B” to “my option” and “their option”. Once this happens, it can be very hard to let them “win” – even if you know that both options are quite reasonable.