Contributing

There are heaps of ways you can contribute to Extempore—whether you’ve been hacking Extempore code for a long time or whether you’re just starting out. If you’re in the latter category then you can especially help out with the docs—take notes as you learn, write down (& suggest) fixes for anything that’s missing or unclear. It’s hard for Andrew & Ben to remember what it’s like to start out, but that doesn’t mean that others should have to fight through like we did :)

If you’ve got questions, or want to bounce around some ideas for improvements before you go ahead and make big changes then get in touch on the mailing list.

Documentation

This documentation is built using Jekyll, using the Jekyll Doc theme. Since it’s all just markdown files in the docs/ subdirectory, it’s easy for others to contribute.

If you find problems, or can think of improvements, fork away on GH, edit the documentation source files and submit a pull request—there’s a nice little “Edit on Github” link at the bottom of every page. We’d love these docs to become a real community effort. There will probably be a few broken links and other little things like that, so no pull request is too small to be appreciated :)

Building

To generate these docs, you’ll need a working ruby install & a few packages. The best way to get started is to use bundler, then it’s:

    bundle install # to get all the packages
    bundle exec jekyll build # to build the docs website

If you want to see your changes locally (which of course you do!) then you can run a local ‘live’ test server with

    bundle exec jekyll serve

Hosting

The docs are built and hosted automatically by GitHub through GitHub pages. So the docs are re-built for every commit to the master branch of the extemporelang.github.io repo.

Style

There’s no official styleguide, and as mentioned elsewhere some of this started off as blog posts on Ben’s blog, so it’s a bit all-over-the-place when it comes to style. Still, here are some general style/formatting principles:

  • on each page, use level 2 headings (##) as the highest level (i.e. no level 1 headings—that’s reserved for the page title)

  • content should go in either the overview, reference or guides folders (wherever it fits best)

  • use kebab-case for docs filenames (e.g. page-title.md)

  • a conversational writing style is ok, preferrably in a second-person narrative voice (e.g. “now you’re built an instrument”) rather than first-person (“now we’ve built an instrument”) (note: there’s a bunch of “we” stuff in there from when Ben first wrote the material as blog posts, but the plan is to change it to “you” over time)

Extempore wishlist

Building a new programming language, runtime and ecosystem is a multifaceted job. Here are a few projects (some small, some not so small) which would be really nice—if you think you’d like to contribute, give us a shout out on the mailing list.

Core

These projects involve hacking on the Extempore executable itself:

  1. upgrade to latest LLVM with ORCJIT
  2. port Extempore to 64-bit ARM (aarch64)

xtlang

These projects (mostly) involve adding/improving libraries for doing cool things in xtlang:

  1. a 2D/3D hardware-accelerated data visualisation library (e.g. a vega-lite for Extempore)
  2. add TensorFlow C bindings for (at least) inference, & an example of how to run a cool deep-learning-powered image processing model
  3. add DirectX (or perhaps Vulkan) support
  4. implement Godot/Extempore integration

Ecosystem

These projects are “ecosystem/tooling” projects.

  1. create an xtlang package manager (e.g. CPAN or cargo for Extempore)
  2. make the CMake build process aware of the xtlang ahead-of-time compilation process, so that make aot only re-aot-compiles an xtlang library if it has changed


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