Development guidelines

Prerequisites

just and cargo-nextest.

Development commands

The recommended way to work with the project is via the project Justfile and the extension Justfile.

Extension just commands can be invoked via submodules, e.g. just client build.

Comments philosophy

I don’t believe in “code must be self-documenting”; if your code is at least somewhat non-trivial, annotate it. The documentation should be concise; it’s mostly a hint to the reader on what they should anticipate, and should focus on the context rather than on actions.

Testing philosophy

Snapshot tests are preferred when possible. Snapshot tests tend to both be more declarative, allow testing more behavior, and survive refactoring much better than usual tests.

We use expect-test for snapshot tests in most cases.

Benchmarking, profiling and measuring memory

This project has commands to measure memory usage, profile, and benchmark the project.

For profiling and measuring memory, check out:

just analyze --help

Note that measuring memory affects profiling, so don’t interpret the phase timings as a source of truth when also measuring memory. Treat these as two different modes.

Benchmarks can be run with

just bench