Hi Livewire peeps.

"When V3?"
Right now I can't give you a date, but I CAN be transparent about the process and my progress, so here's what I would type to everyone who asks if I had time:

"Why can't you set a date?"
Because I don't know that I can stick to one and I don't want to say something and then go back on it. I COULD set a deadline for myself and ship no matter what, but I really don't want to be forced to skimp on things to get it out the door.

"Deadlines and concessions are good when shipping software. Shipped is better than perfect"
In general, I agree. If I ran a software company, I would want every developer to think like this. However, Livewire V3 is a ground-up rewrite that will likely be the codebase we will all work with and use for a very long time. If it's rushed and I don't like it, I won't be happy maintaining it and I won't be excited to add new features.

"Aren't rewrites almost always a bad idea?"
Yeah, almost always. And maybe even in this case too. In an alternate universe, I incrementally improved the codebase and shipped things as I went. However, Livewire is such a complex tool I'm not sure I would have been able to incrementally find better abstractions and performance enhancements without starting from scratch.

I'm trying to lay a foundation for a VERY bright future for Livewire. I want to take this tool as far as I possibly can, and this is the foundation of that.

"Is Livewire really THAT complex of a tool?"
I often find myself asking the same question. Hypothetically, one could write a super simple version of Livewire that would be extremely simple to build (I actually did this as a thought experiment in a Laracasts series called "Building Livewire from scratch"). But you would be missing key features that make Livewire worth using. For example: nesting components, wire:model binding, morphdom, security stuff, non-primitive public properties, etc... This list feels endless actually.

So again, yeah, I've asked myself this a thousand times and always come back with: yeah, it is. lol.

"Why not involve the community more in this process?"
I'm trying to do that more with this "V3" discussion section. Getting feedback from the community is super valuable to me, but opening up the codebase and accepting pull requests and such would actually make this process much slower. For now, I still want to be able to "move fast and break things" with the V3 codebase until I land on the right architecture and abstractions. So I will try to be better about looping in the community, but less on a: "here's the codebase, let's write V3 together" and more a "here's what I'm thinking about doing with X, what do you think?"

"How much do you have left to do? I mean, you demoed a working version at Laracon right? Can't you just ship it?"
I don't regret demoing it at Laracon, but I can see how it might feel weird that it's taking me so long.

What I demoed at Laracon was very experimental. It was a codebase that had all the V3 features, but only had hacky versions of the V2 features I needed for the talk.

The bulk of the work since has been supporting every single feature in V2 so that every single unit and browser test passes with the new codebase. We are nearly finished with that process, so now what's left is:

• Finalizing the new architecture. I'm mostly happy with it, but there are still things I'd like written more cleanly (particularly on the JavaScript end)
• Making the new V3 features production-ready. I had demo-ready versions built, but there's still some work to get them tested and fleshed out (particularly hot-reloading and "navigate")
• Documenting everything. I'm going to try and not do a complete rewrite of the docs because that would take forever, but I at least have to write new docs for all the new stuff and I want to re"work" all of the documentation to improve upon it in the ways you've all mentioned in the other post.
• Testing in actual applications
• Writing an upgrade guide (there are more changes than I anticipated, though still not an overwhelming amount)

"When will you release a beta version?"
I still don't have a date or anything, but I can say I've already put together an "alpha" and sent it to a few folks to try out. Once I have a "feature-complete" version for both V2 and V3 features I'm going to put it in "beta" and start sending it to more folks. Please hold off on asking for beta access until I'm at that point.

"How will you launch it when it's time?"
Well with lots of theatre of course! I'd like to do a small, online, event for the launch to properly show you everything live. That's just an idea right now and nothing more though.

So there you go, a giant thought spew of everything I think when someone says "when V3?".

TLDR: Can't give a date, but I can tell you I'm working every single day on getting it out the door.