Docleaf - a Rust-based rewrite of Breathe under the Parity License

[michaeljones]

I am the creator and one of the maintainers of Breathe. I have not been very active for a long time and the project has improved and grown thanks to the work of others.

I have struggled with the balance of engaging with a semi-successful open source project. The experience served me well when I started it 14 years ago but the current trade offs are not to my liking. I have created the Docleaf project under the Parity license as I feel that better captures the values I current hold for "open source" initiatives.

About Docleaf

Docleaf is a ground up rewrite of Breathe using Rust for as much as possible to try to tackle the performance and memory consumption issues we've had on the project. A complete build on a large code base was twice as fast using Docleaf as Breathe. I do not have figures for the memory consumption aspect.

Docleaf aims to support the majority of the directives and features that Breathe supports but initial work as focused on compatibility for C projects for which it is largely on par with Breathe though I'm sure some gaps still exist.

The Parity License

The Parity License allows for free use of Docleaf with open source projects. If you would like to use Docleaf with a closed source project, you have to buy a commercial license to support the project.

The Parity License is not currently approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) so you can consider Docleaf to be more "source available" than open source in that respect.

The idea is that this will lead to a more sustainable project than Breathe has proven to be. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Impact on Breathe

I will not be engaging much with Breathe development but then I haven't for a long time. Breathe has other maintainers and progress will continue as their time and energy allows. Please consider ongoing support of the project via the Open Collective page particularly if you use Breathe for a commercial project.

Links

• Repository: https://github.com/docleaf-labs/docleaf
• Website: https://www.docleaf.io/