[Draft] The Loft Manifesto

This document is expected to change substantially

What?

Loft is:

• an open source, peer-reviewed index of Swift libraries.
• a community of developers and users evolving:
  • individual libraries
  • the Swift library ecosystem
  • best practices for Swift programming.
• an incubation area for libraries targeted at Loft.

Why?

• The success of any programming language ultimately depends on building a vibrant ecosystem of high-quality libraries.
• Swift doesn't yet have one.
• A vibrant library ecosystem is supported by maintaining a degree of consistency.
• The best libraries are not simply inventions of their authors, but a product of evolution over time based on feedback from their actual and prospective users.
• Evolution implies some degree of instability.
• Library design is an art that flourishes through a shared culture of understanding and discovery of design principles and techniques.
• Swift needs a home where that culture can flourish and produce real, widely-used, evolving libraries.

Where?

• Website
• GitHub org
• Incubation Area
• Loft forums. Unless Swift wants to offer an area of its forums for Loft discussion, we'll establish a discourse server. Someone needs to check the Swift forums code of conduct to see if it is compatible with, or can replace, the Loft one.
• Discord server

Peer Review

• Baseline Boost model, which was mostly adopted by the Swift evolution process.
• Acceptance of new libraries into the index is entirely up to the review manager (no core team rulings).
• In making a determination, the review manager should try to reflect the consensus of the most thoughtful reviews.

Granularity

A highly granular structure is encouraged, allowing users to control their dependencies, helping to prevent dependency loops among packages, and encouraging contribution without undue implied maintenance commitment. Umbrella re-exporting packages based on category (e.g. "Algorithms," "DataStructures," etc.) can make usage more convenient when granularity is unneeded.

Ownership

Original authors and their designated maintainers maintain full control over the evolution of their packages, without required review, once accepted into the Loft index. Reviews are encouraged for substantial source breaking changes.

Stability

• There is no Loft policy mandating ABI stability.
• There is no Loft policy mandating API stability, but a high degree of API stability with only conscientious exceptions is strongly encouraged.
• Any library maintainer is free to promise full API, or even ABI, stability to their clients.
• Loft libraries follow semantic versioning conventions.

Infrastructure/Systems

• Infrastructure development and maintenance can be a major drag on an open-source organization's viability.
• GitHub's services are:
  • free for open-source projects.
  • mostly excellent.
  • well-known and understood.
  • well-documented.
  • used successfully to support many important projects.
• Therefore, the Loft makes maximal use of GitHub's facilities and loft libraries are strongly encouraged to do the same.
• Opening an issue tracker to arbitrary non-actionable bug reports can create an untenable time sink for an open-source maintainer. Therefore, exposing an issue tracker for a project is not required as long as the project accepts PRs.

Seed Libraries

We should launch with some packages already in the collection. Some ideas:

• John Sundell's “Files” package.
• Other packages by Sundell
• A package that provides the ability to XCTest things that FatalError.
• Sam Lazarus developed 8 packages to provide a seed foundation.
• Most of the code in penguin is ready to be broken out into Loft packages.

Anticipated Problems

SwiftPM doesn't yet work on Windows.

License

Like Swift itself, all Loft Libraries are Apache 2.0 licensed.