On 22 January 2013 18:02, Alec Teal wrote: > 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?
Please suggest documentation improvements as you learn about GCC's internals. You're in the best position to do so, because you're the target audience of that documentation and the people who already know the details don't need the docs and are busy working on the gory details. > I digress, but this certainly should be considered in more detail. It has been. Many, many times. No matter how often you consider it you cannot instruct volunteers to work on something they don't want to work on. I started contributing to GCC by helping with documentation, and I still fix docs and write wiki pages to improve things, but obviously I can't do it all. It would be nice if for once the people saying we should improve the docs actually helped out.
