On 5/22/18 10:00 PM, Mike Franklin wrote:
On Tuesday, 22 May 2018 at 16:27:05 UTC, Eduard Staniloiu wrote:
Let the brainstorming begin!
An apprentice for Walter.
I think Walter needs an apprentice (or 10). Too much knowledge about
D's design decisions, present, and future are locked up in his mind. He
needs to be disseminating his knowledge, training the next generation of
D maintainers, and widening the bottleneck that currently exists for
fixing bugs and evolving the language.
I was actually thinking, we need really a layman's explanation of how
things work in the compiler. I'm not sure this requires apprenticeship,
it may just need more documentation.
Common questions I have when looking at dmd code:
Where is this in the source?
How do I know I'm in a function?
How do I know I'm in a template?
What module am I in?
How do I know what has been run?
What is the proper way to generate lowered code?
I recently fixed a bug in DMD for the first time at dconf. The PR still
hasn't been merged yet, but I'm confident about the fix.
But I really only was able to fix this because the way the code was
written -- essentially it was a string mixin, and I could see where the
error was in the string. But it took ALL DAY to find it. Knowing where
to look is hugely important (and I would never have found it without the
help of several people during the hackathon), but also knowing what you
are looking at is hugely important.
-Steve
