Ian leaving and the glorious future

[Richard Eisenberg]

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.