Should we re-organize crates within the workspace to be more conventional?

[fitzgen]

While there isn't really One True Way to organize a workspace and the crates within it that is adopted by a majority of the rust ecosystem, of the different ways to do it, the most prevalent convention I've seen is:

• to have the main, public facing crate in the root of the repo (ie the cranelift crate)
• for all sub crates cranelift-foo, put them at crates/foo

For example, both cargo and wasm-bindgen follow this convention.

How do folks feel about switching to this layout?

See also #305 for this same thing for wasmtime.

[bnjbvr]

Thanks for proposing this. I don't have a strong opinion here, except that a few months ago we've moved the crates which lived in a lib directory to the top-level and prefixed them with "cranelift-", and this proposal seems to revert this. I don't strongly care one way or the other. But if this is a matter of fads, likely to change again over the next few months, I'd rather keep something stable, and the current scheme works ok for me.

(In terms of autocomplete, the "c{first sub-crate letter}" sequence wouldn't change, so this would be mechanically equivalent to what we have now. Yes, this matters for me :))

[bnjbvr]

ping @fitzgen, any updates about this idea?

[fitzgen]

We did this in wasmtime. Still +1 for doing it here too.

Happy to make a PR if others are on board!

[bnjbvr]

I realize that my fuzzy-search auto-complete tooling in terminals will be less effective, if we did this. Currently, I can type "gen" for "cranelift-codegen", but with the additional "crates" directory, I won't be able to do this. It's a minor annoyance, if there was a way to fix it (use special paths for Cargo.toml files and the src directory they refer to?) it'd be nice, otherwise i can live with it.

[bjorn3]

All cranelift crates are now in paths like cranelift/codegen. All wasmtime crates are now in paths like crates/debug.