What's the intended focus of this project?

[tarpas]

How do you guys use it productively or intend to use it after reaching maturity? Is it the vision that multiple "new" vendors of PLCs can use and contribute to this compiler?
Or alternatively (this would excite me) it would allow cross-platform development of PLC library or whole program using automated testing, text files project representation, version control and fast change/compile/run cycle? Then that would be imported and deployed using traditional vendors ecosystem?
Any other formulation of the vision?

[ghaith]

Can we answer with both of the above? =)
The main idea is to get a compiler that is similar to compilers used in other languages, so something that you can run like gcc/clang/rustc instead of having to run a full engineering solution. Testing/fast cycles as you mention them are the main reason we would like to have a compiler that is decoupled from a runtime/engineering solution. We would like it if other companies eventually contribute to it. This is one of the reasons we went with a license that requires contribution (and to answer your other discussion post whether it is the correct one or not we'll have to see (= )

[tarpas]

:) How would you prioritise a conversion between PLCOpen XML format and the textfiles/directories form (for RuSTy)? Would you consider it to be in the scope of this project? I wasn't successful in finding a solution. I'm thinking about making the tool.

[ghaith]

We have partial support for some of the plc open format (CFC is based on the plc open Function block diagram specification with some exceptions). I think if you want to extend the functionality to support ST and the missing features (variable declaration is currently done as code) we'd be happy to merge the functionality.
We had some plans to also support the new persistence standard (IEC61131-10) instead of PLCOpen XML but we honestly currently have many open topics we would like to finish up first. (OOP, more codesys compatibility).

So if you would like to work on the functionality I would recommend starting from the cfc parser crate. I'd be happy to support you with any questions/clarifications there.

[ghaith]

For reference: https://github.com/PLC-lang/rusty/tree/master/compiler/plc_xml and https://plc-lang.github.io/rusty/cfc/cfc.html