So in this entire thread in particular this post there is the notion that tests could replace formal interfaces. At the moment intefaces are only defined in documentation and that leads to a lot of stability issues it seems. Now people could write test functions for their interfaces, but then you w…

I seem to recall at least one similar project: GitHub - rafaqz/Interfaces.jl: Macros to define and implement interfaces, to ensure they are checked and correct. Is it comparable? Did I miss others?

I never really did much with Interfaces.jl honestly, i have too many other packages and I dropped the ball after a few minor criticisms :sweat_smile: I think it needs a lot of feedback and working over by more people to be usefull.

Apologies if my criticism was part of the issue. I think its an important effort but there’s a lot to consider when making an interface to making interfaces. I’d be happy to comment if pinged on GitHub. I’ve been trying to get back in the habit of answering GitHub messages while on the bus so I’m no…

Yeah, as I said they were minor, and also probably valid. But overall I guessed the design just missed the mark, and maybe most designs will miss the mark for something like that. Its hard to justify working on that kind of speculative idea when there are so many more concrete projects with real use…

There has also been GitHub - quinnj/Interfaces.jl: interfaces for Julia , but Interfaces.jl (by @Raf ) seems more complete - and more substantial - both wrt. mandatory/optional parts of an interface - and going further than e.g. C#, i.e., just ensuring that proper methods are defined - by defining test…

FWIW I would be happy to do further work on Interfaces.jl, if other people were interested in joining the effort. But its really easy to take something like this in the wrong direction without users and code review. I’m not attached to the details of the design except I think something like the man…

@FelixBenning reading over your original post this really is pretty much what Interfaces.jl already does, except it’s not tied to abstract types. These days a lot of interfaces use traits rather than inheritance (think Tables.jl), so they need to be decoupled. (So the problem is either making Int…

How should trait-based interfaces be represented in such format? For example Tables.jl which are not supposed to be an abstract type? I think the best minimal interface is just a single function signature :slight_smile:

The annoying thing is that neither Traits nor interfaces is really part of the standard language so not enough people use them causing the mentioned stability problems. And I am mostly a consumer of types - so I would really need AbstractArrays to implement them and the packages I use to use them. B…

Interface guarantees

Internals & Design

ToucheSir May 22, 2023, 10:15pm 3

You reminded me of Towards the creation of an interface testing package, which both mentions other libraries and has a decently lengthy background discussion.

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Towards the creation of an interface testing package General Usage	26	4188	March 21, 2023
What interface bugs have you ran into in the ecosystem? General Usage question	35	1735	January 31, 2024
Standard interface definitions for Julia? Internals & Design question	12	2345	July 16, 2022
Could introducing formal interfaces be nonbreaking? Internals & Design speculative	36	1046	June 4, 2025
Tests as contracts? General Usage	6	229	May 26, 2025

Interface guarantees

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