Descriptive Name for the Proposal

Introduction

Short description of the idea proposed with explained motivation.

The motivation could be:

• Improved users experience for API changes and extensions. Code snippets to showcase the benefits would be nice here.
• Performance improvements with the data, if available.
• Improved engineering practices.

Introduction may also include any additional information that sheds light on the proposal, such as history of the matter, links to relevant issues and discussions, etc.

Proposal

A full and detailed description of the proposal with highlighted consequences.

Depending on the kind of the proposal, the description should cover:

• New use cases supported by the extension.
• The expected performance benefit for a modification.
• The interface of extensions including class definitions or function declarations.

A proposal should clearly outline the alternatives that were considered, along with their pros and cons. Each alternative should be clearly separated to make discussions easier to follow.

Pay close attention to the following aspects of the library:

• API and ABI backward compatibility. The library follows semantic versioning so if any of those interfaces are to be broken, the RFC needs to state that explicitly.
• Performance implications, as performance is one of the main goals of the library.
• Changes to the build system. While the library's primary building system is CMake, there are some frameworks that may build the library directly from the sources.
• Dependencies and support matrix: does the proposal bring any new dependencies or affect the supported configurations?

Some other common subsections here are:

• Discussion: some people like to list all the options first (as separate subsections), and then have a dedicated section with the discussion.
• List of the proposed API and examples of its usage.
• Testing aspects.
• Short explanation and links to the related sub-proposals, if any. Such sub-proposals could be organized as separate standalone RFCs, but this is not mandatory. If the change is insignificant or doesn't make any sense without the original proposal, you can have it in the RFC.
• Execution plan (next steps), if approved.

Open Questions

For new proposals (i.e., those in the rfcs/proposed directory), list any open questions.