| I don’t really disagree with most of your points, but what you describe does not sound like it should be a committee with governance rules and member libraries tied to an RFC process. What you describe sounds like you could just create your own single library like a Swiss army knife that contains adapters to rationalize the semantics if you want, even at the ABI level if truly needed. Member libraries can do a best effort support for not breaking that adapter library’s way of wrapping them, and/or contribute patches that keeps the adapter in sync with new releases of the library. This makes the adapter layer become totally opt-in and backported rather than required via consortium membership & RFC governance, and even leaves room for competitor adapter tools to coexist that might do things differently. Ultimately my concern with a governance model is that it creates political power to compel the member libraries to do things that might go against the needs of their users for the sake of the consortium. I just don’t see a reason why that’s more valuable than letting all the libraries do their own thing and let users choose or make their own custom adapters. This example of array APIs is nothing like say overall HTTP protocol or IEEE floating point protocol, which are cases where a governing standard makes sense. This is nothing like that in my opinion. |