I have been trying to do my stuff for a few years. We conduct a
programme called "Essential Abstractions in GCC" which is aimed at
taking a novice to a level from where she can do independent
experimentation with GCC internals.
I put together a bunch of teaching assistants (about 15 of them) for
about 60 participants. Carefully designed programming assignments are an
integral part of the training. The program ends with us summarizing the
essential abstractions in 17 or 18 pictures with the hope that if one
can understand the concepts represented by the pictures, one can walk
the maze of the GCC code.
You can find the details of the latest offering at
http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/grc/gcc-workshop-12/.
I would like to take this training program to the next level but so long
it remains my personal baby, my funding agency does not feel that I have
accomplished much because they feel that if my program has any merit,
the GCC community would adopt it :-(
Uday.
Aldy Hernandez wrote, On Wednesday 23 January 2013 08:07 PM:
Uday Khedker<u...@cse.iitb.ac.in> writes:
I think we need to come out of the "documentation" mindset. No amount
of conventional documentation is going to help. What we need is a
training material that included well defined assignments.
FWIW, I initially learned GCC by an internal training program Jeff Law
devised over a decade ago (*). So perhaps there is some truth to the above
statement.
Of course, it didn't hurt that I had a cadre of good and patient
maintainers willing to answer questions.
[Before anybody asks, the training program is probably no longer
relevant. So no fair bugging Jeff about it :)].
But anyways, that's just me. Different folk learn differently.
Aldy
(*) I think Alex Oliva was also a student of the Law training program :).
--
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Dr. Uday Khedker
Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engg.
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India.
Email : u...@cse.iitb.ac.in
Homepage: http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday
Phone :
Office - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 7717, 91 (22) 2576 7717 (Direct)
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