naming

name

naming

description

How to think about names in the Grida repo — not conventions, but what a name commits you to, reveals about the system, and costs to change. The central discipline is that a strict, honest name refuses to grow, and that refusal drives the repo's shape (flat modules, small agnostic packages, suffix siblings). Use when planning a new package, crate, module, directory, route group, or test corpus — the name comes first.

Naming

Vanilla conventions (snake_case in Rust, kebab-case in JS/TS, PascalCase exports, use-* hooks) are table stakes — assume them. This document is about the observations on top: what a name commits you to, what it reveals, and what it costs when it's wrong.

Name first

Pick the name before the types, before the tests, before the file exists. If the name doesn't come easily, the design isn't ready — don't start coding; sharpen the concept until the name falls out. Maintainability is downstream of naming. How a module grows, how cleanly it retires, how safely it can be deleted — all of it is decided at the moment you choose what to call it.

A strict, honest name is a scope gate

A name's primary job here is to refuse the wrong content. A module called painter should feel actively wrong to host a layout helper; a package called @grida/cmath should feel wrong to host color logic. The strictness is deliberate — it is the mechanism that keeps features from leaking into each other.

"Strict" requires "honest." A name that no longer describes what's inside has stopped being a gate: it won't reject foreign additions, and new readers can't trust it. When contents drift past the name, you have two moves — rename to match what the module has become, or extract the drifted pieces out — and you must pick one promptly. Letting a name go stale is how codebases rot quietly.

Three consequences cascade from the gate discipline, and together they produce the current repo structure:

1. Modules stay shallow. You will rarely see a module nested deeper than two levels inside a crate's src/ or a package's src/. When you're tempted to grow a third level, the parent's name has stopped describing what's inside — flatten or extract, don't nest.
2. Flatten with prefixed siblings, or collapse into one file. Before reaching for a subdirectory, ask whether the new thing is a sibling variant of an existing file (painter.rs + painter_debug_node.rs + painter_geometry.rs) or whether it collapses into the existing file. Both preserve the parent's scope; a new subdirectory quietly widens it.
3. If it resists flattening, it is a new module. The thing that won't fit under the strict name doesn't belong there. It wants its own tiny, agnostic package or crate. The repo has many small @grida/* packages and small crates precisely because this extraction was made each time a sibling would have diluted the parent's name.

One module, one thing

The gate only works because each module commits to one thing. Two-thing modules can't enforce either scope — the name becomes ambiguous as a filter, and new additions slip in under whichever reading is convenient. When you notice a module doing two things, pick the primary, rename for it, and extract or delete the other. The repo's proliferation of tiny packages is this choice compounded.

The diff test

A well-named module exhibits two properties under change. Treat them as the measurable signal that naming is doing its work:

1. A feature change lands in one file, or a tight set of sibling files. Diffs that scatter across unrelated modules mean the boundary isn't where the name implies it is.
2. The file can be deleted with confidence. Remove it and the compiler or test suite will tell you exactly what else must go — or nothing does. If removal requires a cross-cutting hunt through unrelated names, the module was leaking all along.

A codebase where neither test passes easily has a naming problem dressed up as an architecture problem. The inverse is the real payoff: when both tests pass, code grows by adding siblings or spawning small packages, and it retires by a single git rm.

A name is a contract at the scope of its reach

The cost of a bad name is rename friction × fanout. Fanout is set by where the name is visible, and the difference is severe:

• A directory is seen by whoever walks the tree. Rename cost: git mv + import updates. Cheap.
• A published identifier (@grida/cg, Cargo name) is seen by every call site in every branch in every downstream repo. Rename cost: coordinated migration, deprecation window, semver break.

This asymmetry is why the directory name and the published name can diverge. packages/grida-canvas-cg publishes as @grida/cg: the long directory pays for browsability (the canvas family clusters in the file tree) where rename is cheap; the short scope pays for ergonomics where rename is expensive. The Rust side, by contrast, aligns — the engine repo's crates/grida (gridaco/nothing) publishes as grida because the core crate is also the project's public namespace, and keeping the two in lockstep removes a name to remember. Two different trade-offs; pick per surface. Invest heavily in a name before it escapes its file; once it's a public surface, the name is a commitment.

A name is a diagnostic

A name that feels hard to pick is telling you something about the module, not your vocabulary. Common tells:

• Tempted to stamp the child with the parent's name. The parent isn't carrying its scope. Fix the parent — don't double-stamp. grida-canvas/canvas-text/ is the symptom; grida-canvas/text/ is the correction.
• Can't name the new thing without qualifying against a sibling. The sibling is too close — you haven't factored the shared abstraction, or the two don't belong in this parent.
• The strict name won't stretch to fit what you want to add. This is the system working. The answer is never to loosen the name; it's to flatten the addition as a sibling, or extract it.
• Need a README paragraph to explain the module's name. The boundary is wrong. Names that require prose describe accidental groupings.

Naming is the cheapest design review you get. Listen to it when it resists.

Terseness is a claim of uniqueness

Two-letter names (cg, fe, k/, q/) are not abbreviations — they are assertions that nothing else in this parent competes for the slot. The assertion is load-bearing; reviewers rely on it to mean "this is the canvas-graphics module," not "one of several."

The bar to mint one: would adding any peer to this parent make the terse name ambiguous? If yes, qualify now. If no, terseness pays — proportionally to how often the name appears at call sites. Long breadcrumb names earn their length by narrowing; every segment in grida-canvas-react-renderer-dom discriminates against a sibling that differs at that segment. Segments that don't narrow are decoration, and decoration erodes trust in the ones that do.

Order segments so tree-views become indices

The alphabetic sort in a file tree is the primary lookup index most readers use. Domain first, role last makes the tree a usable index — the canvas family clusters, its react variants cluster under that, the DOM renderer variant under that. Role-as-prefix inverts this and scatters siblings across the alphabet by what they do rather than what they're of. That's why *-hosted, *-wasm, *-react, *-renderer-<backend> are always suffixes.

Scope membership and lifecycle signals are governance

@grida/* and the grida-canvas-* package family are not filing conventions — they are assertions that these packages share release cadence, review ownership, and compatibility guarantees. Adding a package to the scope is a governance decision. react-p-queue lives unscoped because it doesn't derive identity from Grida.

The same is true of lifecycle signals in names — -legacy, -experimental-*, x- (cross-cutting / vendor-adjacent), -hosted. They carry more trust than documentation because they sit in the name itself, and that trust decays the moment they stop being accurate. Prune: promote out of experimental/ when the shape settles; remove legacy/ when the replacement is done; don't let x- become the label for "anything weird."

Test corpora want queryability, not hierarchy

A flat directory of kebab-breadcrumb filenames is an index optimized for grep and prefix-completion — the reader's first motion — not browsing. Nest only when a subfolder would be a browseable category a reader would open without knowing the case they want. Almost no real test corpus is that.

Route groups partition readers

(www) / (site) / (workbench) / (workspace) / (tenant) encode who is on the other side of the screen, not which feature lives here. Each group is a surface with its own auth, chrome, analytics, and deployability story. Adding a group is an architectural commitment; if it's a new feature for an existing reader, it belongs inside an existing group.

The short version

• Name first. If you can't name it, you don't understand it yet.
• A strict, honest name refuses the wrong content. That refusal is the engine of the repo's shape.
• One module, one thing. Two-thing names can't gate anything.
• Flatten with siblings, or extract a new module. Don't nest to hide scope drift.
• The diff test: well-named modules produce per-file diffs and delete cleanly. Failing either test is a naming problem, not an architecture problem.
• Public names are commitments; directory names are cheap. Let them differ.
• Terseness is a uniqueness claim, not an abbreviation.
• Scopes and lifecycle signals are governance — keep them honest.

See cases.md for concrete tables and the grandfathered short-name list.