This Month in Mun - July 2020

July 30, 2020, The Mun Team

A long list of community contributions, big marshalling performance improvements, technical debt flying out of the window, and a Rustacean Station podcast with the two Mun Core Team members. That can only mean one thing: yet another month of Mun development has come and gone.

At the end of last month, Rustacean Station released a podcast about Mun in which we sat down with host Jeremy to talk about why we chose Rust to develop Mun. If you are interested in having an inside look into Mun’s origins and evolution, we recommend you check it out - or any of Rustacean Station’s other podcasts for that matter!

Community

This month we had some new and exciting community contributions:

  • feature: initial LSP support [PR#236]

  • feat: add Spaceship example [PR#1] After having received a lot of Break It contributions, this Spaceship game marks the first Make It contribution for season 1 of our Make It or Break It contest, pushing the limits of Mun to Rust marshalling.

    Spaceship game written with Mun and Rust
  • improvement(tools): bump bindgen dependency to 0.54 [PR#242]
  • fix(parser): parsing of unmatched right curly braces (’}‘) [PR#243]
  • fix: removed outdated comments [PR#245]
  • feat(cli): Implement mun new and mun init [PR#246]

Thank you for all of your contributions, and a warm welcome for our new community contributors!

We have added one additional good first issue on Github, which is a good starting point for anyone who wants to get involved with Mun:

If you are interested in helping develop Mun - but are not sure where to start - feel free to reach out to us on Discord or Twitter. To support our cause, please consider donating to our Open Collective or Github Sponsors.

Mun v0.3 progress

The Mun Core Team has been making steady progress on other improvements and refactoring for our Mun v0.3 release. With this tock release we hope to improve the user experience for people writing and embedding Mun, as well as enhance the developer experience for people contributing to Mun.

  • improvement(runtime): add benchmarks for and optimise struct field marshalling [PR#238] Based on feedback from the Veloren Team we started some guided optimisation of our struct marshalling code, which has resulted in huge improvement:

    Performance improvements for Mun struct marshalling
  • misc(ci): build binaries for release branches [PR#240]
  • refactor: upgrade to salsa 0.15 [PR#244]

In the coming month we’ll be finishing up our Inkwell upgrade, allowing us to release our compiler crates in the future while cleaning up some technical debt in the process. At the same time, we are adding support for multi-file projects to our ABI, compiler, and runtime.

For more details, please check out our high-level roadmap on Github that details new features for the upcoming two releases - Mun v0.3 & v0.4 - as well as a backlog of features that are still to come.