Project Amber Design Documents on GitHub

As discussed in a Brian Goetz post on the amber-spec-experts mailing list, an effort is currently underway for "migrating design docs to GitHub." The GitHub repository is openjdk/amber-docs and it already hosts some frequently-referenced Project Amber design documents.

The project's main README states that this repository "is for design notes, presentations, guides, FAQs, and other collateral surrounding OpenJDK Project Amber." It also explains the relationship between the Amber design documents in this repository with those hosted on the OpenJDK Project Amber site: "Most documents here are written in (pandoc) Markdown, and changes made to Markdown sources are automatically formatted and pushed to the OpenJDK website.

The Amber design documents hosted on openjdk/amber-docs are currently categorized as either design-notes or guides. Here are some of the Amber design documents already hosted in the new openjdk/amber-docs GitHub repository (mostly in GitHub-friendly MarkDown format):

• Design Notes
  • Towards Better Serialization
  • Data Classes and Sealed Types for Java
  • Extending switch for pattern matching
  • Pattern Matching for Java
  • Pattern Matching for Java -- Semantics
  • Pattern Matching for Java -- Runtime and Translation
  • Type patterns in switch
  • Symbolic References for Constants
  • Data Classes for Java (October 2017) (HTML)
  • Data Classes for Java (February 2018) (HTML)
• Guides
  • Local Variable Type Inference: Frequently Asked Questions
  • Local Variable Type Inference: Style Guidelines
  • Programmer's Guide to Text Blocks

The moving of OpenJDK source and artifacts to GitHub via Project Skara is paying benefits already in terms of accessibility for Java developers. The moving of Amber design documents to GitHub will likewise make these documents more readily available. As a side note, the OpenJDK design discussions and decisions are also often readily available from the relatively new Inside.java blog that features "news and views from the Java team at Oracle."

Although these Project Amber design documents have long been publicly available, this migration to GitHub should make them even easier to access and will likely increase awareness of and access to these documents. Undoubtedly, advantages inherent with a modern version control system will be gained including easier ability to make, review, track, audit, and contribute changes.