Conduct survey to gauge developer platform support requirements

[chillsauce]

Objective

Note: the objective should not be shared in the survey to avoid impacting results

• Understand what platform and development environment EOSIO smart contract developers are currently using
• Understand how dropping native Mac support would impact native Mac developers

Background:

• https://github.com/EOS-Nation/mandel/issues/55

Tasks

• [x] Draft survey copy and questions @chillsauce
• [x] Send survey to EOS Support developer contacts @rroland10
• [ ] Send survey questions to Pomelo grant owners (as part of broader Season 2 survey) @chillsauce
• [x] Analyze survey results

Survey

Intro

EOSIO core development is now in the hands of the community and EOS Support is conducting a survey to better understand the platform and environment needs of developers.

Questions

1. Does your team develop EOSIO smart contracts?

   • Yes
   • No

2. What is your team's preferred development platform(s)? (Select all that apply)

   • Mac
   • Linux
   • Windows
   • Other (specify)

3. What is your team's preferred development environment(s)? (Select all that apply)

   • Web IDE
   • Docker
   • Purely native
   • Cloud VM
   • WSL (Linux native on Windows)
   • Other (specify)

Follow up question only for respondents who selected "Mac" in question 2 and "Purely native" in question 3:

4. Would a well documented Docker image that simplifies the test environment workflow suit your team's development needs if native support for your preferred platform was not available in Mandel?
   • Yes
   • No (Please elaborate)
   • Maybe (Please elaborate)

[dougbutner]

I would elaborate as to the effect of the docker image on development flows in, say, atom or vscode.

Edit: Referring to the follow up question here.

It doesn't make sense in terms of your goals to word the question like this as it's the most important question in the whole survey, but as written it's a setup question, not geared to register a measurable opinion.

So a reference to the actions we're doing and how it changes. I use docker but not for this development so I'm personally not sure how it would affect things, if it's just opening up Docker and running the image or if there's additional steps to make it work, or if I have to change any part of the workflow.

I would venture a guess that Mac is very important to many devs, me included, and I am glad this information is being gathered.

[chillsauce]

I've updated the final question to clarify that the Docker image simplifies the test environment workflow.

[dougbutner]

Another consideration for this question is the ability to switch compiler versions. We have seen with EOSIO that different compiler versions will make a smaller WASM or are even sometimes required to run forked contracts.

Will there be docker images available for every future + then past release of CDT?

[chillsauce]

Question for @larryk85 👆

[tedcahalleos]

From @larryk85: Future releases of CDT will be handled differently in terms of versioning than we handled eosio.cdt. So, each successive binary package will be available for installing and properly versioned.

As far as previous versions, that one will use eosio.cdt which I will show how to install various versions, but I'm not optimizing for that.

[chillsauce]

• 33 EOS developers responded to the platform support survey
  • 17 of those respondents selected "purely native" as their preferred development environment
  • 1 of the respondents who prefer a native development environment said that a well documented docker image would not be an acceptable alternative for the Mac, with the following reason: Docker too slow and created a lot of trash on local machine. Also running native unit tests and each time rebuild docker image is worst dev experience.
  • 12 of the respondents who prefer native development environment said that a docker image would meet their needs and 2 said maybe.
  • We will share D.U.N.E. with respondents and ask for feedback on the experience.
  •