Dev Diary 12/10/2018

• tried to extend the Deserialize with an associated error value to get statically checked error handling rather than serde's dynamic error handling. Failed, the type system is not expressive enough.
  • probably should have given up sooner, this felt like I wasted a lot of time
    • I did learn new things about the rust type system though...
  • settled on stringly-typed errors like serde: https://github.com/ssbrs/legacy-msg/blob/master/src/lib.rs#L19
  • that still left some trouble when implementing visitors, so gave them stringly typed errors as well
• implemented legacy encoding for public keys, wasted a bunch of time error hunting until I realized that the base64 crate does weird things: https://github.com/ssbrs/ssb-multiformats
• set up fuzz tests and test data generation for legacy encoding of public keys, but this is blocked on the base64 bug
• implemented copy-pasted legacy-encoding for multihashes: https://github.com/ssbrs/ssb-multiformats/blob/master/src/multihash.rs

Next up:

• implementing legacy metadata and its json encoding
• message validation
• html version of the spec
• so, so much code clean up
• releases
  • not yet on crates.io btw, I want to keep the flexibility of git dependencies until we know what kind of interfaces make sense

I won't manage to finish it this week, but reasonably soon I'll be done with the legacy stuff. And then I can start thinking about protocol improvements again.