Acknowledgementsalpha

Whose work is moxzi standing on?

moxzi is a Motoko compiler written in Motoko. That sentence only makes sense because other people built the language first, and then built the tooling, the libraries and the community that made a second implementation worth attempting. Almost everything hard about this project was hard in a known way, because someone had already mapped it.

The compiler is a deliberate port of moc, the Motoko reference compiler — faithful to the point of byte-identical output. That is not a small debt to acknowledge. Every design decision we reproduce was made by someone else, and the ones we understood only after getting them wrong were the ones we appreciated most.

The Motoko language and compiler#

The reference compiler and the language it implements, without which none of this exists. Built at the DFINITY Foundation, and now maintained by Caffeine Labs, who steward caffeinelabs/motoko — the repository dfinity/motoko redirects to today. moxzi tracks it and ships upstream's own fixes; the migration-baseline behaviour is a port of their PR #6318, landed days after 1.14.1.

@ggreif · @crusso · @rossberg · @nomeata · @kritzcreek · @luc-blaeser · @matthewhammer · @Kamirus · @rvanasa · @chenyan-dfinity · @paulyoung · @krpeacock

Their work is present here in the most literal way an acknowledgement can mean: the algorithms, the type system, the lowering and the code generation are ports of theirs, and NOTICE records that formally. The provenance page explains exactly what derives from what.

The package ecosystem#

A compiler is only useful if there is something to compile. The mops registry and the libraries in it are what let us test moxzi against real code rather than our own idioms — and the first third-party package we tried found three compiler bugs in an afternoon.

@ZenVoich · @Gekctek · @ByronBecker · @q-uint · @ZhenyaUsenko · @Infu · @fermartz · @Sassy · @Tires · @Seb

Two of those libraries do more than get used: http-assets and certified-assets serve this website. Working inside them closely enough to find bugs is also how you come to appreciate how much they do. Four defects surfaced while deploying this site; all are fixed in our vendored copies, written up in docs/upstream-bugs.md in the release archive, and reported upstream. Both libraries are MIT-licensed, which is what made the forks possible at all.

The ICDevs.org bounty contributors#

Everyone who has taken an ICDevs.org bounty. Bounties are how a lot of this ecosystem's unglamorous, load-bearing work actually got done — the library nobody was assigned to write, the bug nobody owned. Much of what moxzi depends on exists because someone claimed a bounty for it.

And Dominic Williams#

For greenlighting Motoko. A platform company deciding to build a language is not an obvious call, and it is not a cheap one. Everything above follows from it.

Omissions here are oversight, not judgement — corrections are welcome and will be made. See reporting.