Cadence Technical Foundations

[j1010001]

Why (Objective)

High-quality technical foundations (well designed, clear code with no tech-debt, bugs & workarounds) is more efficient to build on and less prone to unintended behaviour leading to errors.

Aside from technical debt, we also had to pause FLIPs. It puts us in a bad light if we ask the community for input, but then let proposals get stale, some are years (!) old. We should be good citizens in the community.

We also have a number of bugs in the codebase. Features sometimes do not work as intended. This leads to frustration of developers, and might even block them from implementing their use case. Worst case the bugs are security issues.

It is essential to deal with those issues before we make further changes to Cadence.

How will we measure success (Key Results) ?

1. Completing the Bugs & tech-debt task-lists.
2. Automation to detect breaking changes in Cadence pre-release is updated to cover all relevant onflow repos.
3. No open Flips from past years. At the start of the cycle, there are [7]

Bugs

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1. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/issues/187
2. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/pull/259
3. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/pull/261
4. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/pull/242
5. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/pull/257
6. https://github.com/dapperlabs/cadence-internal/pull/258

Infrastructure to ensure backward-compatibility

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1. Operationalize Source compatibility suite #3608
   Chore +1

Tech-Debt

Beta Give feedback

1. Revert changes in #2764 after Stable Cadence #2766
   Feedback Technical Debt +2
2. Re-enable disabled contract tests #2719
   Technical Debt Testing +2
   
3. Update checker/interpreter NFT tests to use actual NFT contracts #2503
   Technical Debt Testing +2
   
4. Split runtime/interpreter/value.go into multiple files #2566
   Feedback Technical Debt +2
5. Reorganize repository #526
   Feedback Technical Debt +2
   
6. Move the crypto contract outside of cadence #3135
   Technical Debt +1
   
7. Remove Cadence 1.0 / Crescendo migrations flow-go#6572
   Tech Debt +1
8. Remove attachments enabling flag #3642
   Technical Debt +1
   
9. Fix and improve CCF CDDL in comments #3643
   Documentation Technical Debt +2
   
10. Refactor test utils #3652
    Technical Debt +1
    
11. Refactor tests #3651
    Technical Debt +1
    
12. Misc minor C1.0 updates #3646
    Technical Debt +1
    
13. Move architecture diagram to contributor documentation directory #3650
    Technical Debt +1
    
14. Update old uses of pub and priv #3647
    Technical Debt +1
    
15. https://github.com/onflow/cadence-internal/issues/280
16. Remove the old compiler and VM PoC #3705
    Technical Debt +1
    

Clean-up open Flips

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1. Cleanup all open FLIPs and plan next steps for them #3615
   8 of 8
   +0
   
2. Allow removing type declarations from contracts #3210
   Feature Feedback +2

Stretch goals

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1. Extend Source compatibility suite to selected community projects: Source Compatibility Suite: Run Cadence tests #3644
2. Runtime needs to support importing Attachment and TypeValue of AttachmentType #3114
   Feature Technical Debt +2
3. Split typing from rest of type checker #2630
   Feature Feedback Technical Debt +3
4. Refactor string interpolation to separate parsing logic #3624
   Good First Issue Technical Debt +2