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Showing posts from February, 2016

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Unboxing Packages: source_span

One of the best aspects of a package ecosystem is its ability to foster language-wide conventions without direct involvement from the SDK. Packages work together and build on one another to create something more than any of them could be on their own. The glue that holds this structure together is made of little packages that establish these conventions, that provide a shared language for the ecosystem as a whole to use. One of these glue packages that I find most useful is source_span . This package began its life as part of the more specialized source_maps package, it quickly became clear that the idea of referring to chunks of code was much more broadly applicable. I factored it out, tweaked the API to make it more general, and over time added a few additional features. The result is the package I’ll talk about today. The basic idea underlying source_span is that there should be a straightforward and consistent way for packages to refer to spans of text. This is useful for ass