Some available near-term tasks

[StachuDotNet]

Writing this up for @ditansu who has volunteered some availability to help out with dark-next.
That said, this is generally a good snapshot of what's most available right now while ...

• @OceanOak is busy finishing up our tree-sitter parser, and removal of LibParser
• I'm busy rewriting the interpreter, which includes impacts to run-time type-checking (this work blocks quite a few tasks 'above' it, and I won't be done for a week or so 🤞 🚧)

, and it's probably useful to anyone else who's interested in contributing as well.

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First, here are some good warm-up tasks:

• just the the devcontainer running, and build working, incl tests passing -- it's been a few months, and things have changed
• if anything is confusing in the repo, let us know (incl docs, code, etc). maybe just peruse and ask Qs.
• get the devcontainer to not re-download tree-sitter for every container restart
  • see build-tree-sitter script. It clones every time now but if we already have the artifact, there should be no need to re-clone.
  • (I ran into this recently when restarting the container on a train without internet)
  • (Dmitrii has completed this)
• tidy any CLEANUPs and TODOs
  • just search throughout the codebase for TODO and CLEANUP and see if there's any low-hanging fruit (accessible tech debt to kill)
  • avoid anything in: RT, Interpreter, Type-checking, Parsing
  • so, Builtins and up is OK/unblocked
  • if anything is nonobvious, or seems quite involved, probably skip over it. There are a lot of these that probably only make sense to me or Ocean (or Paul), and would be better if we just stumbled upon them later

after that, here are some projects I think would be in your wheelhouse, and very appreciated:

• get CLI working on Windows (if you have a Windows machine)
  • test exe; see if it works, maybe with self-signing
  • if it works, get install and self-update working
  • (Component: CLI Runtime #5252)
• Lang Server errors should fail gracefully (CLI Runtime: Improve handling of language server failures #5308)
• "darklang run-script file.dark (make this explicit)" (Component: CLI Runtime #5252)
• get WASM builds working & demo'd
• make DateTime more precise; add TimeSpans (see Component: Standard Library #5239) (lower priority)

If any of those are of interest, I'll be happy to write up more on any specific one.

[StachuDotNet]

An additional independent task would be trying to get Dark compiling to WASM again, with a really minimal demo. This is probably not a small task - I've spent many an hour working on Dark+Blazor stuff. That said, I'm hoping that things will be easier now, in a .NET 8 world.