Vincent Hanquez wrote:

As a suggestion to increase participation, OcamlLab recently hosted a compiler hacking evening [1] and maybe it would be a good idea to host the same kind of thing for GHC ?

That's a good idea Vincent.

If it's not practical to meet in the same physical place (not enough people in the same place, no place to meet, etc), organizing IRC hacking session might a good backup option.

Maybe ICFP in Boston in Septemtber? Cheers, Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

I think a hacking session is a great idea, either over IRC or at ICFP. I'm also thinking about how to foster involvement from newcomers on a more continual basis. Every several months, someone posts saying, essentially "I'd like a project. Give me one." The answers seem to be, "Find an interesting ticket and fix it." The problem is that, often, the *interesting* tickets are the ones that newcomers would have a hard time with. What if there were a page with a curated list of newcomer-friendly tickets? Every few weeks, I see a bug come up that looks easy enough to fix, but very non-critical. I would be happy to set up this page and serve as its maintainer. I would want to add a link to it from the main "working on GHC" wiki page, so it's easy for newcomers to find. The idea would be that a newcomer fixes a few tickets there, and then has enough knowledge to tackle something harder. The piece of this that I would help with is that I'm only familiar with the first stages of the compiler (to varying degrees): lexing, parsing, renaming, typechecking, desugaring, Core, and a bit of the simplifier. After that (optimizations, code generation, cmm, stg, ...) is a murky haze to me. Do we think such a page is a good idea? As I said, I'm happy to write it and maintain it, as well as serve as an email contact to people who want to contribute and want help. And, is there someone willing to curate the part of the page (and perhaps answer email) about the "second half" of ghc? Thanks, Richard On 2013-08-05 09:15, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

Vincent Hanquez wrote:

...

As a suggestion to increase participation, OcamlLab recently hosted a compiler hacking evening [1] and maybe it would be a good idea to host the same kind of thing for GHC ?

That's a good idea Vincent.

...

If it's not practical to meet in the same physical place (not enough people in the same place, no place to meet, etc), organizing IRC hacking session might a good backup option.

Maybe ICFP in Boston in Septemtber?

Cheers, Erik

OK -- the page is up at http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Newcomers Please improve it as you see fit! Richard On 2013-08-06 07:04, Vincent Hanquez wrote:

On 08/05/2013 10:51 AM, Richard Eisenberg wrote:

...

I think a hacking session is a great idea, either over IRC or at ICFP.

I'm also thinking about how to foster involvement from newcomers on a more continual basis. Every several months, someone posts saying, essentially "I'd like a project. Give me one." The answers seem to be, "Find an interesting ticket and fix it." The problem is that, often, the *interesting* tickets are the ones that newcomers would have a hard time with. What if there were a page with a curated list of newcomer-friendly tickets? Every few weeks, I see a bug come up that looks easy enough to fix, but very non-critical. I would be happy to set up this page and serve as its maintainer. I would want to add a link to it from the main "working on GHC" wiki page, so it's easy for newcomers to find. The idea would be that a newcomer fixes a few tickets there, and then has enough knowledge to tackle something harder.

I think that's exactly what i was describing with having a list of low hanging fruits for newcomers. I think it's very worthwhile, and have this list refreshed every few weeks make it probably even better.

...

The piece of this that I would help with is that I'm only familiar with the first stages of the compiler (to varying degrees): lexing, parsing, renaming, typechecking, desugaring, Core, and a bit of the simplifier. After that (optimizations, code generation, cmm, stg, ...) is a murky haze to me. Do we think such a page is a good idea? As I said, I'm happy to write it and maintain it, as well as serve as an email contact to people who want to contribute and want help. And, is there someone willing to curate the part of the page (and perhaps answer email) about the "second half" of ghc? I'm by no mean an expert in code generation and lower layers, but unless someone more knowledgeable want to do that, I can help curate the second half part of the list.

I've had to deal with the stage 1 compiler for two different reasons: - I check out a new tree to work on a new task, and I forget to build before modifying the code. - I'm working on a tree with a working stage-1 compiler, but then I change the interface file format. After the stage-2 compiler builds, it can't do anything because it can't read any of the libraries. Another nice benefit of working on stage 1 is that I can put off dealing with Template Haskell until the core functionality is working. I always get a little confused with the git commands to generate patches in just the right way. If someone else feels confident about this, you can add the section -- I agree it would be an improvement. Richard On 2013-08-09 11:13, Yuri de Wit wrote:

Richard,

thanks for this! One item that probably deserves it's own section is how to generate and submit a patch.

And as an aside question, when would one need to compile state 1 vs stage 2 (aside from the first compilation)?

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Richard Eisenberg wrote:

...

OK -- the page is up at http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Newcomers [1]   Please improve it as you see fit!

Richard

On 2013-08-06 07:04, Vincent Hanquez wrote: On 08/05/2013 10:51 AM, Richard Eisenberg wrote: I think a hacking session is a great idea, either over IRC or at ICFP.

I'm also thinking about how to foster involvement from newcomers on a more continual basis. Every several months, someone posts saying, essentially "I'd like a project. Give me one." The answers seem to be, "Find an interesting ticket and fix it." The problem is that, often, the *interesting* tickets are the ones that newcomers would have a hard time with. What if there were a page with a curated list of newcomer-friendly tickets? Every few weeks, I see a bug come up that looks easy enough to fix, but very non-critical. I would be happy to set up this page and serve as its maintainer. I would want to add a link to it from the main "working on GHC" wiki page, so it's easy for newcomers to find. The idea would be that a newcomer fixes a few tickets there, and then has enough knowledge to tackle something harder.

I think that's exactly what i was describing with having a list of low hanging fruits for newcomers. I think it's very worthwhile, and have this list refreshed every few weeks make it probably even better.

The piece of this that I would help with is that I'm only familiar with the first stages of the compiler (to varying degrees): lexing, parsing, renaming, typechecking, desugaring, Core, and a bit of the simplifier. After that (optimizations, code generation, cmm, stg, ...) is a murky haze to me. Do we think such a page is a good idea? As I said, I'm happy to write it and maintain it, as well as serve as an email contact to people who want to contribute and want help. And, is there someone willing to curate the part of the page (and perhaps answer email) about the "second half" of ghc? I'm by no mean an expert in code generation and lower layers, but unless someone more knowledgeable want to do that, I can help curate the second half part of the list.

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