The Steps of Creating a New Open Source Library

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Table of Contents

Recently, I’m doing the refactoring job of fhash lib, which is a part of flibs, during the refactoring, I realised that to create a new open source project, we should have some basic steps, and follow the steps we will keep moving to right forward without lost.

Steps

Ok, let’s check the core steps:

  1. API Design Lock Down
  2. Write the code
  3. Write the UT
  4. Write the benchmarking tools
  5. Create a document of these APIs
  6. Announce your library

The benefit of Writing Documents

Most of developers don’t like to write the document, it’s so boring. But actually the document is not written only for yourself, it will be a great help for all the people who will maintain this project. Try to think a about it, if there is a open source library without any API document or comments in the code, will you use it in your project? The answer is NO obviously, so let me brief the benefits of writing document:

  • Document will guide people to understand what is this quickly
  • Document will help people to go to the right forward
  • Document will help people who want to use the project

In The End

There are many many open source project without any document, and all of them almost failed, no one knows what is this, no one knows how to use it. So let’s create the open source project with more documents :D