The Public Keyword and Public APIs in Julia

Explore the concept of public APIs in Julia and the introduction of the `public` keyword in this conference talk from JuliaCon 2024. Delve into the motivation behind declaring public APIs, including facilitating package upgrades, documenting useful functionality, and preventing implicit definitions. Learn about the syntax for marking symbols as public and the current conventions followed by Julia. Discover how bindings are marked public, the recursive nature of publicity, and the automatic publicizing of exports. Gain insights into tooling support, such as REPL helpmode warnings and autocomplete features. Finally, examine future developments, including marking struct fields as public, disabling internal access by default, and formally specifying interfaces.

The `public` keyword and how public APIs work in Julia | Lilith Hafner | JuliaCon 2024