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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Guidelines for contributing to Fennel

True leaders are hardly known to their followers. Next after them are the leaders the people know and admire; after them, those they fear; after them, those they despise.

To give no trust is to get no trust.

When the work's done right, with no fuss or boasting, ordinary people say, Oh, we did it.

  • Tao Te Ching chapter 17, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Reporting bugs

  • Check past and current issues to see if your problem has been run into before. Take a look at the issue tracker and the mailing list.
  • If you can't find a past issue for your problem, or if the issues has been closed you should open a new issue. If there is a closed issue that is relevant, make sure to reference it.
  • As with any project, include a comprehensive description of the problem and instructions on how to reproduce it. If it is a compiler or language bug, please try to include a minimal example. This means don't post all 200 lines of code from your project, but spend some time distilling the problem to just the relevant code.
  • Add the bug label to the issue.

Codebase Organization

The fennel module is the fundamental entry point; it provides the entire public API for Fennel when it's used inside another program. All other modules except fennel.view are considered compiler internals and do not have a guaranteed stable API.

  • src/fennel.fnl: returned when Fennel is embedded programmatically
  • src/launcher.fnl: handles being launched from the command line
  • src/fennel/repl.fnl: provides interactive development context

The core modules implement the text->AST->Lua pipeline. The AST used by the compiler is the exact same AST that is exposed to macros.

  • src/fennel/parser.fnl: turns text of code into an AST
  • src/fennel/compiler.fnl: turns AST into Lua output
  • src/fennel/specials.fnl: built-in language constructs written in Lua
  • src/fennel/macros.fnl: built-in language constructs written in Fennel
  • src/fennel/utils.fnl: definitions of core AST types and helper functions

Finally there are a few miscellaneous modules:

  • src/fennel/friend.fnl: emits friendly messages from compiler/parser errors
  • src/fennel/binary.fnl: produces binary standalone executables
  • src/fennel/view.fnl: turn Fennel data structures into printable strings

Bootstrapping

Fennel is written in Fennel. In order to get around the chicken-and-egg problem, we include an old version of the compiler that's used to compile the new version.

  • old/fennel.lua: older version of Fennel compiler from before self-hosting
  • old/launcher.lua: older version of the command line launcher

This old version (based on 0.4.2) does not have all the newer language features of Fennel except in cases where we have explicitly backported certain things, such as collect and icollect.

Contributing Changes

If you want to contribute code to the project, please send patches to the mailing list. (Note that you do not need to subscribe to the mailing list in order to post to it.) We also accept code contributions on the GitHub mirror if you prefer not to use email.

For large changes, please discuss it first either on the mailing list, IRC/Matrix channel, or in the issue tracker before sinking time and effort into something that may not be able to get merged.

  • Branch off the main branch. The contents of this branch should be the same on Sourcehut as they are on the Github mirror. But make sure that main on your copy of the repo matches upstream.
  • Include a description of the changes.
  • If there are changes to the compiler or the language, please include tests. You can run tests with make test.
  • Make sure that your changes will work on Lua versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and LuaJIT. Making fennel require LuaJIT or 5.2+ specific features is a non-goal of the project. In general, this means target Lua 5.1, but provide shims for where functionality is different in newer Lua versions. Running make testall will test against all supported versions, assuming they're installed. If you don't want to install every supported version of Lua, you can rely on the CI suite to test your patches.
  • Be consistent with the style of the project. Please try to code moderately tersely; code is a liability, so the less of it there is, the better.
  • For user-visible changes, include a description of the change in changelog.md. Changes that affect the compiler API should update api.md while changes to the built-in forms will usually need to update reference.md to reflect the new behavior.

If all goes well, we should merge your changes fairly quickly.

Suggesting Changes

Informal discussion of changes is easiest on the IRC/Matrix channel, but the mailing list can also be good for this. More serious proposals should go on the mailing list or issue tracker. There is a possibility that there is already a solution for your problems so be sure that there is a good use case for your changes before opening an issue.

  • Include a good description of the problem that is being solved.
  • Include descriptions of potential solutions if you have some in mind.
  • Add the appropriate labels to the issue. For new features, add enhancement.