CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Crystal

So you've decided to contribute to Crystal. Excellent!

Using the issue tracker

The issue tracker is the heart of Crystal's work. Use it for bugs, questions, proposals and feature requests.

Please always open a new issue before sending a pull request if you want to add a new feature to Crystal, unless it is a minor fix, and wait until someone from the core team approves it before you actually start working on it. Otherwise, you risk having the pull request rejected, and the effort implementing it goes to waste. And if you start working on an implementation for an issue, please let everyone know in the comments so someone else does not start working on the same thing.

Regardless of the kind of issue, please make sure to look for similar existing issues before posting; otherwise, your issue may be flagged as duplicated and closed in favour of the original one. Also, once you open a new issue, please make sure to honour the items listed in the issue template.

If you open a question, remember to close the issue once you are satisfied with the answer and you think there's no more room for discussion. We'll anyway close the issue after some days.

If something is missing from the language it might be that it's not yet implemented or that it was purposely left out. If in doubt, just ask.

Substantial changes go through an RFC process.

The best place to start an open discussion about potential changes is the Crystal forum.

What's needed right now

You can find a list of tasks that we consider suitable for a first time contribution at the newcomer label.

As you feel more confident, you can keep an eye out for open issues with the following labels:

• community:to-research: Help needed on researching and investigating the issue at hand; could be from going through an RFC to figure out how something should be working, to go through details on a C-library we'd like to bind.
• community:to-design: As an issue has been accepted, we are looking for ideas on how it could be implemented, this is, a high-level design for the feature at hand.
• community:to-implement: After a design has been agreed upon, the remaining task is to actually code it and send a PR!
• community:to-document: Similar to the one above, but this one is for those awesome devs that are happy to contribute with documentation instead of just code.

Furthermore, these are the most important general topics in need right now, so if you are interested open an issue to start working on it:

• Documenting the language
• Documenting the standard library
• Adding missing bits of the standard library, and/or improving its performance

Labels

Issue tracker labels are sorted by category: community, kind, pr, status and topic.

Community

These are the issues where help from the community is most welcome. See above for a description on newcomer, to-research, to-design, to-implement and to-document.

Label in-progress is used to signal that someone from the community is already working on the issue (since GitHub does not allow for a non-team member to be assigned to an issue).

The label shard-idea refers to a feature proposal that, albeit good, is better suited as a separate shard rather than as part of the core library; so if you are looking for a shard of your own to start working on, these issues are good starting points.

Kind

The most basic category is the kind of the issue: bug, feature and question speak for themselves, while refactor is left for changes that do not actually introduce a new a feature, and are not fixing something that is broken, but rather clean up the code (or documentation!).

PR

Pull-request only labels, used to signal that a pull request needs-review by a core team member, or that is still wip (work in progress).

Topic

Topic encompasses the broad aspect of the language that the issue refers to: could be performance, the compiler, the type system, the code formatter, concurrency, and quite a large etc.

Status

Status labels attempt to capture the lifecycle of an issue:

• A detailed proposal on a feature is marked as draft, while a more general argument is usually labelled as discussion until a consensus is achieved.

• An issue is accepted when it describes a feature or bugfix that a core team member has agreed to have added to the language, so as soon as a design is discussed (if needed), it's safe to start working on a pull request.

• Bug reports are marked as needs-more-info, where the author is requested to provide the info required; note that the issue may be closed after some time if it is not supplied.

• Issues that are batched in an epic to be worked on as a group are typically marked as deferred, while low-prio issues or tasks far away in the roadmap are marked as someday.

• Closed issues are marked as implemented, invalid, duplicate or wontfix, depending on their resolution.

Contributing to...

The documentation

The language reference is available at https://crystal-lang.org/reference/. See the repository at crystal-lang/crystal-book for contributing to it.

The standard library documentation is on the code itself, in this repository. There is a version updated with every push to the master branch here. It uses a subset of Markdown. You can use Ruby as a source of inspiration whenever applicable. To generate the docs execute make docs. Please follow the guidelines described in our language documentation, like the use of the third person.

Additionally, all official documentation can be found on the Crystal website.

The standard library

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/fork )
2. Clone it

Once in the cloned directory, and once you installed Crystal, you can execute bin/crystal instead of crystal. This is a wrapper that will use the cloned repository as the standard library. Otherwise the barebones crystal executable uses the standard library that comes in your installation.

Next, make changes to the standard library, making sure you also provide corresponding specs. To run the specs for the standard library, run make std_spec. To run a particular spec: bin/crystal spec spec/std/array_spec.cr. You can use make help for a list of available make targets.

Note: at this point you might get long compile error that include "library not found for: ...". This means you are missing some libraries.

Make sure that your changes follow the recommended Coding Style. You can run crystal tool format to automate this.

Then push your changes and create a pull request.

The compiler itself

If you want to add/change something in the compiler, the first thing you will need to do is to install the compiler.

Once you have a compiler up and running, check that executing crystal on the command line prints its usage. Now you can setup your environment to compile Crystal itself, which is itself written in Crystal.

The compiler needs LLVM and some other libraries. See list of all required libraries.

Executing make crystal builds the compiler into .build/compiler and you can run it using the wrapper script at bin/crystal. The script sets up the proper environment variables that the compiler can find the standard library source files in src/.

make compiler_spec runs the compiler specs. make std_spec runs the standard library specs. make primitives_spec runs the specs for primitive methods with an up-to-date Crystal compiler. You can use make help for a list of available make targets.

This guide

If this guide is not clear and it needs improvements, please send pull requests against it. Thanks! :-)

Making good pull requests

The commit history should consist of commits that transform the codebase from one state into another one, motivated by something that should change, be it a bugfix, a new feature or some ground work to support a new feature, like changing an existing API or introducing a new isolated class that is later used in the same pull request.

Review history should be preserved in a pull request. If you need to push a change to an open pull request (for example because specs broke and required a fix, or for applying a review suggestion) these changes should be added as individual fixup commits. Please do not amend previous commits and force push to the PR branch. This makes reviews much harder because reference to previous state is hidden.

If changes introduced to master branch result in conflicts, it should be merged with a merge commit (git fetch upstream/master; git merge upstream/master).

Minimum requirements

1. Describe reasons and result of the change in the pull request comment.
2. Do not force push to a pull request. The development history should be easily traceable.
3. Any change to a public API requires appropriate documentation: params (and particularly interesting combinations of them if the method is complex), results, interesting, self-contained examples.
4. Any change to behaviour needs to be reflected and validated with specs.
5. Any change affecting the compiler or performance-critical features in the standard library should be checked with benchmarks how it affects performance.

Reviews

Reviews are conducted by community members to validate a contribution and ensure quality standards are met. Approvals from Core Team members are required for accepting a pull requests. Other community members are encouraged to do reviews as well. Leave suggestions for improvements or approve a change when it looks good to you.

1. Make sure the formal minimum requirements are met, for the change itself and the PR. Cross check with the referenced issue(s).
2. Check if CI is successful. If not, try to figure out what's wrong and add a comment about it. If a failure seems unrelated, maintainers can try to rerun the job.
3. Leave inline comments when you want to request changes or ask for clarification. Suggestions are often understood as requirements, so make it clear if a proposal is optional or you're just asking for feedback.

Accepting a Pull Request

The process of accepting a pull request entails the following check list:

1. At least two approvals by Core Team members; one approval if the author is a Core Team member. Only approvals based on the most recent code version count (ignoring minor changes like fixing a typo).
2. There are no outstanding questions nor requested changes in the pull request and associated issues.
3. Title and description appropriately represent the final state of the change.
4. Proper labels are applied (usually at least a topic: and kind: label).
5. Change is based on a fairly recent commit of the master branch. When in doubt, merge master and wait for CI.
6. CI is green.

When these conditions are met, a Core Team member can mark the pull request as accepted by adding it to the current development milestone. This signals that the PR is scheduled to be merged soon and gives another chance for final reviews.

The current development milestone is typically the milestone for the next release. During the freeze period of a release, feature enhancements are added to the milestone of the next release. Freeze periods are announced on the community forums and usually span two weeks before the scheduled date of a minor release.

Merge Queue

The current development milestone serves as a merge queue. Open pull requests on that milestone are eligible for being merged.

Pending pull requests should usually stay in the queue for at least one full business day, allowing other reviewers to take a final look at it. This wait time can be extended, for example for big changes or when there was a lot of recent activity in the discussion. Urgent bug and regression fixes can skip the line.

If reasonable objection or questions arise while waiting for merge, the pull request must be removed from the milestone until they are resolved.

It's good practice to have a single maintainer responsible for operating the merge queue.

Merging

Before merging, make sure the pull request has been on the merge queue for some time (usually 1+ business days) and there has not been any more recent discussion that questions the current state of the change. If conditions are met, the pull request can finally be merged. Use squash merge to not pollute the version history of the main branch with details of the pull request process. For non-trivial changes, the merge commit should contain a short description.

For maintainers with push access

1. Do not directly commit to the master branch. Always create a feature branch and pull request.
2. Feature branches should typically be created in your fork. The main repo should only contain essential branches.
   • CI changes affecting circle CI only run for branches on the main repo. They should be prefixed ci/ to trigger a maintenance release.
   • Long-running feature branches that accept contributions must be pushed to the main repo in order to allow PRs targeting that branch.

Git pre-commit hook

Code submitted to this repository should be formatted according to crystal tool format. A pre-commit hook can be installed into the local git repo to ensure the formatter validates every commit: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/blob/master/scripts/git/pre-commit

Install the pre-commit hook:

ln -s scripts/git/pre-commit .git/hooks

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.