TLA+ codebase

The tlaplus codebase is very complex. There are over 600k lines of code, in over 2000 files, written over 20+ years. And yet as the best distributed systems modelling tool on the market today, maintaining and improving it is critical.

TLA+ should be regarded as a piece of mission critical software, like a cryptography library. This means that it cannot accept any kind of change that could potentially break it. Especially because being open source software means that somebody will also need to spend time fixing it.

This chapter is meant to orient new programmers that want to navigate the codebase and start contributing, as well as reorient existing ones.