On Mon, 2019-03-25 at 19:51 -0400, nick wrote: > Greetings All, > > I would like to take up parallelize compilation using threads or make > c++/c > memory issues not automatically promote. I did ask about this before > but > not get a reply. When someone replies I'm just a little concerned as > my writing for proposals has never been great so if someone just > reviews > and doubt checks that's fine. > > As for the other things building gcc and running the testsuite is > fine. Plus > I already working on gcc so I've pretty aware of most things and this > would > be a great steeping stone into more serious gcc development work. > > If sample code is required that's in mainline gcc I sent out a trial > patch > for this issue: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=88395 > > Cheers, > > Nick
It's good to see that you've gotten as far as attaching a patch to BZ [1] I think someone was going to attempt the "parallelize compilation using threads" idea last year, but then pulled out before the summer; you may want to check the archives (or was that you?) IIRC Richard [CCed] was going to mentor, with me co-mentoring [2] - but I don't know if he's still interested/able to spare the cycles. That said, the parallel compilation one strikes me as very ambitious; it's not clear to me what could realistically be done as a GSoC project. I think a good proposal on that would come up with some subset of the problem that's doable over a summer, whilst also being useful to the project. The RTL infrastructure has a lot of global state, so maybe either focus on the gimple passes, or on fixing global state on the RTL side? (I'm not sure) Or maybe a project to be more explicit about regions of the code that assume that the garbage- collector can't run within them?[3] (since the GC is state that would be shared by the threads). Hope this is constructive/helpful Dave [1] though typically our workflow involved sending patches to the gcc- patches mailing list [2] as libgccjit maintainer I have an interest in global state within the compiler [3] I posted some ideas about this back in 2013 IIRC; probably massively bit-rotted since then. I also gave a talk at Cauldron 2013 about global state in the compiler (with a view to gcc-as-a-shared- library); likewise I expect much of the ideas there to be out-of-date); for libgccjit I went with a different approach
