Pkl Evolution

by Dan Chao on April 29th, 2024

Today, we launch Pkl Evolution, a new repository that holds Suggested Pkl Improvements, Changes, or Enhancements (SPICEs) for Pkl’s language, tooling, and ecosystem.

The purpose of the Pkl Evolution repository is to provide visibility to the community how design decisions are made in Pkl. Additionally, it is a place for the Pkl maintainers to get feedback as in-flight proposals are being considered.

Process for SPICEs

The process for a SPICE is:

  1. The SPICE is authored, and submitted as a pull request.
    When authoring a SPICE, determine your SPICE number by adding one to the latest SPICE (inclusive of open pull requests).

  2. The contents of the SPICE are discussed and reviewed in the pull request.
    It is then either accepted or rejected.

  3. The status of the SPICE is updated, and the pull request is merged. Both accepted and rejected SPICEs get merged into the main branch.

The acceptance of a SPICE does not need to block any implementation work. On the contrary, it can be quite useful to have an implementation ready to go during the process of review.

The acceptance of a SPICE depends on concensus from the Pkl maintainers.

Contributing to Pkl Evolution

There are two main ways you can participate and contribute to Pkl Evolution.

The first way is to participate in the pull request discussion for a SPICE. Your thoughts and opinions are valuable to us, and can help shape the direction of the language.

The second way is to author SPICEs of your own. If you would like to contribute your own SPICE, we recommend you first the idea to GitHub Discussions to solicit feedback. This can help shape the direction of the SPICE before too much work goes in. It can also potentially filter out ideas that are non-starters.

Status of Pkl Evolution

Some of you might recognize how similar this is to Swift Evolution. If you’ve noticed that, you’re totally right! We borrowed much of this from the Swift folks.

Compared to Swift Evolution, we are choosing to keep our process relatively light-weight. There is no review manager, and no designated review period. This is an intentional choice on our part, and we expect that our own process will evolve over time.