Friends, A couple of weeks ago Simon M advertised the possibility that he and I might run a "GHC Hackathon", in Portland, later this year prior to ICFP (Sept 14-16 or thereabouts). The idea is that we'd give an extended tutorial about GHC's glorious innards. Then we'd have some hacking time in which you can pick something which you think GHC could do better, and implement it, with Simon and me wandering causing trouble. (E.g. look at GHC's list of tasks http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/report/2, but don't limit yourself to those.) We're trying to find out whether anyone would come if we ran it. At the Haskell workshop in Tallinn, around 30 people put up their hand to say they were interested. So far, though, only 11 people responded on the Wiki page. That's on the borderline of whether it's worth doing the preparation and setup it'd need. So if you are the kind of person who's interesting in working on GHC (and the mailing list activity suggests that your numbers have increased sharply over the last 12 months), this message is to encourage you to go to the Wiki page: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Hackathon Please vote in the little (2-question!) survey, to indicate your interest, and add any comments and suggestions of you own. Excerpts below. Could be fun. Simon ============================ The 2006 GHC hackathon At the 2005 Haskell workshop we were asked to consider running a "GHC hackathon" around ICFP 2006. A surprisingly large number of people in the room indicated that they'd be interested in coming to such a thing. This Wiki page says what we have in mind, and asks you to indicate whether you'd be likely to come, and what sort of meeting you'd like. What we do will depend on what you say. Purpose GHC is used by lots of people, but its implementation is rather over-centralised, even though GHC is a BSD-licensed, open-source project. The biggest obstacle to more people getting involved is that GHC is a big, and hence intimidating, system. The purpose of the GHC hackathon is to give a tutorial in GHC's innards, plus time to work on some projects in a context where there are plenty of people around to help. The objective is to substantially broaden (more numbers) and deepen (more confidence) the community of people who feel they know enough to fix and enhance GHC. We'll suggest some projects, but you're welcome to come along with your own wacky ideas or itches that you want to scratch, and work on them in an environment with a high-bandwidth connection to developers who really know the innards of GHC. You could work on something individual, or in small groups. We anticipate all being in one room, or in a tight group of rooms, so there'd be lots of informal interaction. Also there's a good chance it'll be fun :-) Venue Galois has very kindly agreed to host the meeting. Cost Zero. But you'll have to feed yourself. And you may have to bring a laptop (capable of building GHC). Programme We had in mind the following. One full day of tutorial from Simon & Simon about GHC's glorious innards. Then one or two days of hacking on projects. Timing: The Haskell workshop is on Sunday 17 Sept; ICFP starts the next day. On Saturday is the ML and Erlang workshops. We propose to run the GHC hackathon something like Thurs-Sat 14-16 Sept, so that people who want to go to the ML workshop still can; but those who don't won't have a blank day.