Co-authored by: chandlerc
- Based on [PR 22](https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/83)
- [Idea topic](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/proposal-for-an-incomplete-rough-high-level-overview-ready-for-early-feedback/52)
- [RFC](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/rfc-an-incomplete-early-and-in-progress-overview-of-the-language-design/73)
- [Decision announcement](https://forums.carbon-lang.dev/t/accepted-an-incomplete-early-and-in-progress-overview-of-the-language-design/110)
This proposal should be considered a starting point of the language design. It's not intended to be final; language details may change. This is intended to offer a reasonable starting point for:
- Example code.
- Conceptualizing Carbon at a high level.
- Reasonable, but not necessarily final, approaches to features in README.md.
- If any idea is obviously bad, we can clean it up here.
This proposal is not intended to achieve:
- A whole language design.
- This is way too much work for a single proposal; this is a skeletal framework only.
- As we work on feature-specific designs, we may decide to use other approaches. That's fine: we only need somewhere to start.
- The summaries in README.md may be expected to change over time.
- Feature-specific files aren't intended to be well-written or comprehensive. They are a quick jot of prior thoughts.
- We want to avoid getting stuck on language details that we should consider
more carefully regardless. If you're passionate about a feature, please feel
free to start a new proposal for it.
- Each and every aspect of the suggested overview should be subject to careful
examination and justification before it becomes a settled plan of record.
Chandler started this with https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/22. I've taken it over with the following changes:
- More of a directory hierarchy.
- Trying to thin out the main file (now README.md) to lighter summaries of features.
- Details/rationale/alternatives should be in feature-specific files.
- Draft files are linked as references where added.
For an example of how we may proceed with feature-specific designs, see https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/80. In this structure:
- docs/design/README.md mentions interoperability, with a light overview.
- The light overview is not yet in https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pull/80.
- docs/design/interoperability/README.md goes into more depth on interoperability, covering key points of the approach.
- Individual files in docs/design/interoperability/* go into more depth on interoperability.
Simple designs may not have a subdirectory. All current feature-specific designs do not -- they may be moved later.
Richard Smith
Matt Godbolt
Jon Meow