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Starlark Design Process

Goals

The process aims to achieve the following:

  • The discussion, final state, and evolution of any design proposal is public, discoverable, and non-ephemeral.
  • The community can easily participate in both proposing changes and critiquing them.
  • There is clarity around the status of a proposal and what is needed to move forward.
  • The semantics of the language and API are better specified, and can be reimplemented.

The process focuses on a subset of Bazel features. Features that are too specific, experimental, or temporary are excluded from the process. The goal is to have a well-defined and well-specified core, that users can rely on.

Although the reference implementation is Bazel, the design attempts to be more general and implementation-independent.

Scope

This document concerns the following areas:

  • The Starlark language (anything stated in the specification)
  • The evaluation of BUILD and .bzl files
  • Functions, objects, methods available in BUILD and .bzl files; with the exception of native rules and language-specific API (e.g. js_common)

The following areas are explicitly outside the scope of this design process (follow the standard Bazel review process):

  • Rules built in Bazel, for example cc_library. They should ideally be reimplemented using the Starlark API.
  • Language-specific API, for example java_common and apple_common. They are part of a migration out of the built-in rules.
  • Evaluation of WORKSPACE files.
In Scope Out of scope
glob() java_binary()
rule() genrule()
ctx.actions() js_common
depset() repository_rule()

Process

To propose a change affecting Starlark, please follow Bazel review process, with a few exceptions:

  • Before writing a complete proposal, please file an issue and get preliminary feedback on your idea.

  • The design index is in Starlark repository.

  • Proposals are announced on starlark@googlegroups.com.

  • Once approved, the proposal has to use markdown (discussions and reviews may be done with Google Docs).

Trivial changes to the specification (formatting, clarifications) can be done directly with a pull request.