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Contributing Guide

Contributions to TeaLeaf are welcome. The full contributing guide lives in the repository root:

CONTRIBUTING.md

That document covers project architecture, build instructions, testing, the canonical test suite, version management, PR process, and areas of interest for contributors.

This page highlights the key points. See the Development Setup page for environment setup details.

Ways to Contribute

  • Bug reports – file issues on GitHub with reproduction steps
  • Feature requests – open an issue describing the use case
  • Code contributions – submit pull requests
  • Documentation – fix typos, improve explanations, add examples
  • Language bindings – create bindings for Python, Java, Go, etc.
  • Test cases – add canonical test fixtures or edge case tests

Repository

Source code: github.com/krishjag/tealeaf

Pull Request Checklist

  1. Fork the repository and create a feature branch from main
  2. Make your changes
  3. Run tests and lints: 
    cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace
cargo fmt --check
  4. If you modified .NET bindings: cd bindings/dotnet && dotnet test
  5. Submit a pull request against main

CI runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows automatically. Version consistency is validated on every PR.

Code Style

Rust

  • Standard rustfmt formatting (no custom config)
  • Standard clippy lints (no custom config)
  • Document public APIs with /// doc comments
  • Edition 2021

C# (.NET)

  • Standard C# naming conventions
  • XML doc comments for public APIs
  • Target frameworks: net6.0, net8.0, net10.0, netstandard2.0

Areas of Interest

New Language Bindings

The FFI layer exposes a C-compatible API that can be used from any language. See the FFI Overview for getting started.

Desired bindings:

  • Python (via ctypes or cffi)
  • Java/Kotlin (via JNI or JNA)
  • Go (via cgo)
  • JavaScript/TypeScript (via WASM or N-API)

Format Improvements

  • Union support in binary encoding
  • Bytes literal syntax in text format
  • Streaming/append-only mode

Tooling

  • Editor plugins (VS Code syntax highlighting for .tl)
  • Schema validation tooling
  • Web-based playground

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the MIT License.