Scott Robert Ladd wrote: the gist of Mark's polite rant?
And to fix bugs, I'm expected to learn a variation on Lisp and GIMPLE as well. I'm not saying that expectation is wrong, I am saying it is an impediment to working on GCC.
with respect, I disagree, and I think you should invest the effort before you hazard an opinion here. Compilers are complex beasts, and all involve intermediate languages, and of course these intermediate languages must be learned before you can do anything.
If there is a lack of people fixing bugs, don;t necessarily blame it on people being lazy. Maybe being a volunteer GCC developer is more difficult than it needs to be?
I think a lot of what happens is that easy bugs do get fixed. The ones that don't are often complex, or ill-reported, and thus tend to require a lot of knowledge to work on effectively.
I haven't filed many bug reports recently (though I have in the past) because I didn't feel that the effort was justified by the result. Not that I've given up entirely: I've recently asked about how certain problems should be reported. For example, -floop-optimize2 is a pessimism for many algorithms. Is that a bug, or simply a feature that is not yet fully implemented?
This is a good example of something that likely can only be effectively worked on by someone with a considerable amount of gcc knowledge.
