Catalyst milestone 1: Research

Outputs

• A report summarizing user interviews and containing a qualitative analysis of the discovered use cases.
  • STATUS: Done (#17)
  • An interview with 3 MLabs engineers was performed (1.5h) who's work span multiple Cardano dApp projects. Their feedback is made available in the repo.
  • Additionally, a survey was sent out to MLabs engineers and their feedback is made available in the repo.
• An architecture design document.
  • STATUS: Done (#17)
  • Extensive documentation on design, compiler and codegen is made available in the repo.
• A language specification document elaborating on the data type model features.
  • STATUS: Done (#17)
  • Extensive documentation on design, compiler and codegen is made available in the repo.
• A related work document comparing the proposed technology via a feature matrix with others in the same space.
  • STATUS: Done (#17, #18)
  • Document comparing different schema techologies to LambdaBuffers is made available in the repo
• An initial compiler implementation that performs some basic checks in accordance with the language specification.
  • STATUS: Done (#10)
  • The initial compiler implementation perform kind checking is made available in the repo.

Acceptance Criteria

• At least 3 users/projects have been interviewed about their desired use case for this technology.
  • An interview with 3 MLabs engineers was performed (1.5h) who's work span multiple Cardano dApp projects. Their feedback is made available in the repo.
  • Additionally, a survey was sent out to MLabs engineers and their feedback is made available in the repo.
• The architecture design document is completed and available in the project repository.
  • Extensive documentation on design, compiler and codegen is made available in the repo.
• The initial compiler implementation is completed, capturing SOME of the intended language semantics as described in the Language Specification
  • The initial compiler implementation perform kind checking is made available in the repo.

Evidence of Milestone Completion

• Completed and reviewed design document is available in the project repository.
  • Extensive documentation on design, compiler and codegen is made available in the repo.
• Completed and reviewed initial version of the compiler command line tool made available in the project repository.
  • The Frontend CLI called lambda-buffers-frontend-cli is made available in the repo and is currently able to parse, validate and format .lbf documents that contain the LambdaBuffers type modules:

lambda-buffers/lambda-buffers-frontend$ cabal run 
Usage: lambda-buffers-frontend-cli COMMAND

  LambdaBuffers Frontend command-line interface tool

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text

Available commands:
  compile                  Compile a LambdaBuffers Module (.lbf)
  format                   Format a LambdaBuffers Module (.lbf)

There's ongoing work to integrate the Compiler CLI in the Frontend CLI.

• Test case: Compiler is able to validate a schema that uses a subset of types and capabilities from the spec.
  • Both the Frontend and the Compiler components are accompanied by a test suite that is routinely run by the projects' CI system.
  • A corpus of lbf files is made available in the repo and used in the test suite to ensure correct document handling.
  • The compiler tests on the kind checking machinery is also made available in the repo.

References

• Catalyst project sheet