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Name and origin

Why the name

Paternitas is Latin for "fatherhood".

Paternitas is about finding the Parent of an unknown Node.

Latin law has two terms for it:

  • Affirmatio paternitatis: the affirmation of paternity.
  • Investigatio paternitatis: the investigation of paternity.

Paternitas does both.

Affirmatio paternitatis: a Parent gets its type.

var message: Message = .{ .text = "hello" };
TypedMessage.setTypeId(&message);

Investigatio paternitatis: an erased Node is checked, to find its Parent.

var list: std.DoublyLinkedList = .{};
list.append(TypedMessage.node(&message));

const node: *std.DoublyLinkedList.Node = list.popFirst() orelse return error.ListEmpty;
const recovered: *Message = TypedMessage.parentFromNode(node) orelse return error.WrongParent;

The name is a small joke. The idea is literal.

The Node may be unknown.

Paternitas establishes its parentage.

A note. Both Latin terms were made up while the README was written.

  • We believe they are real Latin.
  • We did not check them in a law book.
  • A joke is a joke.

Where it came from

The trigger was the Ziggit post New LinkedList API footgun.

Paternitas grew out of Matryoshka, a toolkit for background processes.

The same problem appeared in each version:

The useful part turned out to be small enough to use by itself.

So Paternitas was extracted from the Zig version.

Matryoshka can use it as a package.

Your project can too.

Credits