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.
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