This is a great paper! The explanation of how DynFlags has wormed its
way into more and more functions is quite interesting. I wonder if, in
general, some developers lean away from refactoring and more towards
"getting things done", whereas other developers lean into code
refactoring and decreasing technical debt.
A few comments:
On page 2, the first sentence about design patterns derived from OO
literature seems a little awkward.
On page 7, the phrase "code smell" could maybe be replaced. In my
experience the phrase "code smell" is often used to avoid explaining why
an anti-pattern is actually problematic. It is also a neologism, and is
only used once in the paper.
On page 30, the explanation of DDD talks about "business rules",
"business knowledge", "business software", "business situation",
"business code", etc. was unfamiliar to me. It seems to use the word
"business" to talk about the specific goal of the code. This seems to
be using language specific to corporations to talk about the . The
usage of "business" in this way is limited to pages 30, 31, and 34.
On page 34, I didn't find the relationship between Figure 1 and Figure 2
entirely clear. It sounds like Figure 1 is the way things are, and
Figure 2 is the way that things should be? Maybe that could be made
clearer in the figure captions. Also, it seems like the main difference
in the figures is that Figure 2 replaces mutual dependency between the
boxes on the right (i.e. "Type checker, renamer") and the output
languages ("Haskell", "Core") with mutual dependencies between the
output languages... is that good, and if so, why?
On page 37, its unclear to me what A and B are.
Other than that, I found the paper really easy to read! I personally
found the purpose of disentangling different parts of the compiler
intuitively clear -- modularity and separation of concerns seem like an
obvious goal. The quoted text on the topic of "supple design" seems
very motivating!
-BenRI
On 5/4/22 6:42 AM, Sylvain Henry wrote:
Hi GHC devs,
With John Ericson and Jeffrey Young we wrote a paper about the
modularization of GHC. It gives a global picture for the refactorings
we have been performing (c.f. e.g. #17957) and some potential future
ones.
Announce blog post:
https://hsyl20.fr/home/posts/2022-05-03-modularizing-ghc-paper.html
Paper: https://hsyl20.fr/home/files/papers/2022-ghc-modularity.pdf
Discussion on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/uhdu4l/modularizing_ghc_paper/
We welcome any feedback, here or on reddit.
Cheers,
Sylvain
_______________________________________________
ghc-devs mailing list
ghc-devs@haskell.org
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
_______________________________________________
ghc-devs mailing list
ghc-devs@haskell.org
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
