Libraries and Frameworks Working Group

To provide resources for library and framework authors to ensure that BEAM languages have a rich, vibrant ecosystem with a high degree of developer experience.

Libraries and Frameworks Working Group

Mission Statement

• To provide resources for library and framework authors to ensure that BEAM languages have a rich, vibrant ecosystem with a high degree of developer experience. Main Objectives
• Provide and maintain best practices on library and framework standardization, documentation, code, and distribution. Collaborate to work on and make proposals for underlying tooling that improve the experience for library/framework authors and users.
• Provide more visibility into the library ecosystem of the BEAM community on behalf of both authors and users.
• (if Build and Packaging want to move this here, we could also take this over) Improve the user experience in generating and accessing documentation from the shell, IDEs, web pages, and more.

Benefits to the community

• Better, more consistent, and fun-to-use libraries and frameworks for all developers. A rich package ecosystem is essential for any programming ecosystem to thrive.
• Resources for library authors to work together to improve their workflows, allow them to serve their users better, and push for essential changes in the underlying tooling.

Short-term deliverables

• Efforts to improve the story around documenting, maintaining, and releasing multi-package libraries.
• Review the documentation of the best practices and ways people discover libraries and frameworks today.
• Build a shared knowledge base of the issues that library and framework authors face today and how they overcome them.

Long-term deliverables

• Ensure that library and framework authors have the tools to create and maintain these packages.
• Act as an ongoing resource for them to make proposals and discover solutions to problems unique to library and framework authors.
• Maintain the documentation and other resources relevant to library and framework authors.

Why does this group require the Foundation

The amount of libraries and frameworks is growing and will continue to grow. Authors of such remain a relatively small group compared to the ecosystem’s end users, and their voices can quickly go unheard in the noise. However, authors need support for the future of our ecosystem. The awareness brought by this WG can help us communicate with underlying tooling maintainers (like language authors/BEAM) more clearly, with shared knowledge supporting us.

Some of the short and long-term outputs of this working group will include improvements to things like hex, proposals, and potentially subsequent implementations of those proposals to underlying tooling. Some of these may be very involved and take considerable time, effort, and coordination. The potential to provide funding to these projects (given enough support) can make a huge difference and show the people investing their time into growing this community that their efforts are supported.

Initial list of volunteers

• Zach Daniel (Ash)
• Yordis Prieto (Ueberauth, Tesla)
• Michael Crumm (Briefly)
• Adriano Santos
• Wout De Puysseleir
• Noah Betzen
• Tiago Moraes
• Mykolas Mankevicius
• Abhishek Tripathi
• Theo Harris

Current Working Group Chairs

• Yordis Prieto