Project Vision and Scope

[alensiljak]

Let's try to establish some consensus here and elaborate on our ideas.
It seems that everyone has a view on the goals and the direction the project should take. Some consolidation of ideas that results in concentration of effort would be helpful.
Defining realistic goals, agreeing on the most-efficient path, and collaboration from the members are crucial in reaching some concrete results.

The effort in reaching the goal initially stated on Reddit (a complete rewrite) is a relatively large undertaking as a side-project for any single person. Therefore, only as a collective can we achieve a working application that is fun to develop and use, and which provides a financial tool that we find helpful and dependable.

Edit: I would be updating the organization description/readme with any developments here.

Possible available options are:

• complete Ledger rewrite 1-to-1, Rewrite of the existing code #8
• create individual components, like parser, Separate parser crate #11
• start a new (compatible?) application

The goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It may be just a matter of priority in what gets implemented in which order.
Based on the vision, the more concrete steps would be outlined in #4.

[alensiljak]

My initial suggestion/question was a ledger-compatible implementation in Rust, where I could contribute and learn/use Rust at the same time. At that point John suggested that a full rewrite of Ledger would be very useful in itself, attracting contributors and further improving.
In that sense, the initial goal of the project would be a full Ledger rewrite. Once that is achieved, optimizations, fixes, and new features would follow.

In the meantime, I've seen several other suggestions (like building specific components of the system separately, to implementing the logic from other PTA implementations). These are all good ideas and worth discussing pros and cons. Some might just align and be step-stones towards the end-goal.

Edit: The purpose of the full rewrite is the data compatibility. Once this is achieved, we could introduce the version numbers in the data files (#2) and start with modifications.