Ian leaving and the glorious future

[Vincent Hanquez]

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.

-- 
Vincent