In my time working on Julia, I’ve seen a lot of requests for estimates of when some feature will be finished, or a roadmap for how it’s going to be accomplished. This post is intended to summarize why satisfying these requests is sometimes difficult or impossible, and address the much smaller issue …

[image] tim.holy: These are great roles for community participation! One of you could start a “this week in Julia development” newsletter, where you monitor Julia’s GitHub and then write things up in an manner that can be understood by a wider audience. That way it doesn’t slow down developers a…

[image] martin.d.maas: I think we could have a “future of julia” community post That sounds an awful lot like an open-source timeline/roadmap :wink:

Yeah, that would be exactly the point. I don’t know what would be the best way to do it… I guess anyone (for example, me) can start a repo trying to summarize some common sense forward-looking statements that are scattered all over the place (including TODO comments in source code, like one I just …

Jeff has been speaking about the state and future of Julia in these videos [The State of Julia (In 2022) with Jeff Bezanson | JuliaCon 2022]

I think one version of your take here is just that many PRs to julialang/julia could stand to be more descriptive. To me, many PRs at least look like they were discussed/reviewed offline (which they probably were, which seems totally fine), and unfortunately there’s a lack of detail in the github re…

[image] tim.holy: These are great roles for community participation! One of you could start a “this week in Julia development” newsletter, where you monitor Julia’s GitHub and then write things up in an manner that can be understood by a wider audience. That way it doesn’t slow down developers a…

[image] ToucheSir: But surely other languages must have this problem too? Most definitely, but it is also worth exploring what approaches they have taken to fill this “missing middle” of status updates. I’ve really appreciated what KitWare does with their various projects, e.g. ParaView. The…

(Just joking) Please enable the GitHub sponsor feature so that I can ask for roadmaps as a sponsor :laughing: Although promising the deliverability at a specific date can be very hard for open-source projects, I do think there can be roadmaps on: what developers care about in the next few release…

One thing I have often wished for is a technical roadmap, for lack of a better phrase. I’d like to know what changes are desired, to know where contributions might be accepted, even if no developer currently intends to work on those changes. I feel like this is important for cultivating non-maintain…

One thing that’s worth noting is that most contributions that are helpful aren’t the type of thing that would be on a roadmap. The best contributions for casual contributors IMO are things like performance, docs, or one-off bugs. These types of improvements tend to be relatively isolated from other …

Why open-source timelines/roadmaps don't work

Internals & Design

Krastanov May 30, 2023, 9:42pm 27

This is my humble attempt to start such a newsletter: This month in Julia world - 2023-05

21 Likes

Topic		Replies	Views
Where is Julia heading? Lack of clarity about priorities, long-term direction and governance Community question , roadmap	173	6769	November 13, 2025
Julia Roadmap Internals & Design	20	8088	February 2, 2020
Identifying barriers to new contributions to Julia and its ecosystem Community github , contributing	14	1085	January 5, 2025
Where should Julia feature requests go? Internals & Design github , discourse , feature-request	41	3155	March 18, 2024
Suggestion to slightly improve Julia development Community	94	5761	May 31, 2021

Why open-source timelines/roadmaps don't work

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