Hi all, I am an experienced software developer, with an interest in compilers, and an admirer of gcc. I would like to contribute, hopefully reusing some of my existing skills, experience and interests, but unfortunately the (current) overlap is not great, so I am asking for some guidance/reality check.
While I did start my career (a long time ago (my first programming language, in college, was Fortran (77), using punch cards)) writing software in assembly for bare metal and debugging it with an oscilloscope and a serial interface, and I also wrote (in Borland C++) a remote debugger for a micro-controller development board, for a long time now I've only been using higher-level languages, and my C is quite rusty. I am an expert-level programmer in Smalltalk, Java and JavaScript, but I am aware that these are not even client languages, let alone useful/used for gcc development. As far as compiler-related experience, I have worked on a type inferencer for Smalltalk and on a Smalltalk to Java transpiler, part of a proprietary tool that has been used to migrate a very large and successful Smalltalk financial application to Java. I have also written an open-source transpiler from Smalltalk to JavaScript (https://github.com/fmateoc/JsSqueak) that can compile a Smalltalk image to JavaScript code that can be run in a browser. With regards to potential contribution areas, among the supported languages, Objective-C is close enough to Smalltalk that I think I should be able to contribute, but I am not sure how much interest there is for it, especially in its gcc incarnation. I was also thinking (without looking at the code, so this could be just wishful thinking) that I might try to work on something Gimple-related. Of course, this is just what I came up with, based on very incomplete information I would appreciate any thoughts/advice. Thank you, Florin
