channels-rfc.md

• Feature Name: platform_channel_section
• Start Date: 2019-02-27
• RFC PR: (leave this empty)
• Rust Issue: (leave this empty)

Summary

We add a whole new section to the channels list for Platform channels. It contains one channel for each major target platform (Win, Mac, etc).

Motivation

Currently a lot of lore about the quirks of using Rust on a particular platform are spread all around. Rust still has to interact with a lot of platform specific libs, and it would be very good to have a place where people can build knowledge around a target platform they want to use.

Guide-level explanation

Also in the channel list is a "Platforms" section. In this section is one channel per major platform that you might use Rust on. These are most helpful if you need to get help with a particular platform's native libs, setup and building, etc.

Reference-level explanation

The Platforms channel section comes after Rust Extra and has one channel per platform that Rust can target. The proposed channel ordering roughly follows each platform's global market share:

• Android
• Windows
• iOS
• OS-X
• Linux

The description for each channel can simply be "Discussion about Rust on %OS_NAME%"

Drawbacks

Almost none. People can mute the channels that they don't want to hear about.

I suppose it uses 5 slots out of out 500 channel maximum.

Rationale and alternatives

• We could always not add any new channels.
• We could add the platform channels in an existing channel group.

Prior art

We already have a few "specialty" channels in the Rust Extra section.

Unresolved questions

None that I can think of.

Future possibilities

We can always add more channels to this section later. WASM, GBA, Switch, DOS, etc.