On 22/01/13 17:47, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
On 22 January 2013 16:52, NightStrike wrote:
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 4:41 AM, Robert Dewar wrote:
Anyway, it still comes down to figuring out how to find the resources.
Not clear that there is commercial interest in rapid implementation
of c++11, we certainly have not heard of any such interest, and in the
absence of such commercial interest, we do indeed come down to hoping
to find the volunteer help that is needed.
This is a hard task. A volunteer has to be both willing (easy) and
able (very hard). A lot of people that work on GCC have worked on it
for a gazillion years. How much code contribution in 2012 came from
people who did not work on it prior?
Volunteers don't necessarily need to be new volunteers. We also rely
on existing volunteers continuing to do the work.
Perhaps it'd be worthwhile to consider making the compiler easier to
understand, maybe by devoting a lot of effort into the internals
documentation. There's a lot of knowledge wrapped up in people that
could disappear with one bus factor.
Of course it's worthwhile, but it's the usual story. Who's going to do
it? How do you force volunteers to work on simplifying existing code
and documentation? Is that higher priority than "finishing" something
like C++11?
Perhaps, if simplifying + documenting the existing allows a higher power
(work time / unit time, not work as in "lines of code" or something) to
be applied to GCC then yes it could be, perhaps this should be
discussed? I am eager (I doubt I am alone!) to help with GCC, I've read
countless books on compiling, created a language (work stuff, not like
"c++", a scripting language, wont bore you with it), looked at how other
languages are created (to anyone searching [like I was once] look up "a
no frills introduction to the 5.1 Lua VM" and looking up Lua's
compliler, it's implemented in Lua, C, Java... probably some others),
loved it.
I'd love to help with GCC, without documentation (in fact, without
instructions) I have no hope of doing so. Maybe instruct/ask people to
do stuff?
I digress, but this certainly should be considered in more detail.
