carbon-lang/proposals/p0051-decision.md

Decision for: Goals for Carbon

Proposal accepted on 2020-07-14

Affirming:

• austern
• chandlerc
• geoffromer
• gribozavr
• josh11b
• tituswinters
• zygoloid

Abstaining:

• noncombatant

Open questions

There were no open questions. GitHub issue 106 contains points to be considered and, if necessary, resolved in a subsequent proposal.

Rationale

A concrete set of goals is essential to ensure that contributors to the Carbon project are working in the same direction, and as a guide for what constitutes progress in every aspect of the project. It is important to have a coherent, agreed-upon vision and direction for a programming language, as a social contract between people who work on it and people who use it. The goals listed have been iterated on for many months by many parties.

These goals reflect not only the kind of community and language that the core team would like to build, but also the kind of community and language that a large population of C++ users have been asking for from C++ itself. As a consequence, this particular set of goals seems like an important direction in which to experiment with a candidate future for C++ itself. By doing so, it will address a specific group of C++ users.

While there may be some uncertainty about resolving conflicts between goals, particularly migratability and C++ interoperability, the core team feels that they are generally in alignment in this regard. The priority among goals can be revised as needed based on the experience of using it in practice.