[fpc-devel] Summer of code collaboration

[Vittorio Giovara]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be>wrote:

>
> On 10 Feb 2013, at 20:12, Vittorio Giovara wrote:
>
> The iOS experience could be improved in many ways, for example in
> Xcode you cannot set a breakpoint and when you do so with gdb all you
> get is an assembly viewer
>
>
> I don't remember ever hearing about this or seeing a bug report about
> this. It's unlikely that this is related to FPC vs LLVM code or debug info
> generation though. And adding support for LLVM is something different than
> adding support for LLVM + LLVM debug information. The two are completely
> decoupled, and one will not automatically get you the other.
>
>
I wasn't fully aware of that, thanks for the explanation. Yeah as first
project, a LLVM backend support is more than enough, isn't it?
I'll try to reproduce the bug I mentioned with a more recent build of fpc
and open a ticket if it's still present.



> That said, regarding some other things that have been mentioned in this
> thread:
> a) the fpc llvm branch is completely out of date, predates the high level
> code generator that now should be used to add LLVM support, and at best can
> be used to get some ideas or code snippets from. I'm not sure how much is
> really usable though.
> b) I do think that adding an LLVM backend to FPC is useful. As I've
> mentioned before, it's however extremely unlikely that it will ever replace
> existing code generators (for any platform), it would simply become an
> additional option
> c) from the GSoC mentors list, I've understood that the best students are
> generally people who were already involved with the project (on the mailing
> lists, by submitting patches, ...). They are familiar with the project, the
> way contributions are handled, expectations of the existing developers
> regarding new code, and there is more chance that they are interested in
> working on the project in the long term (contributed code that is not
> maintained afterwards is much less valuable, because we already have a lot
> of code to maintain; if you have to maintain code, it's generally easier to
> do so if you wrote it yourself)
>
>
For (b) it fully makes sense. For (c) there is a long period between
student selection and start of the project, where student can approach
organizations and contribute to them; generally the students who are
already capable of providing patches have higher chances of being accepted
(although that's not always the case). If you think having a student is
something useful we can highlight the "collaboration" on each organisation
website in order to get maximum visibility, but it's the mentor who has to
pick the right student in the end.
What about (d) is this project feasible? If not, is it can you split in
(parallel) sub projects so that more people can tackle it?


>
> Jonas
>
>
To everyone, it was not my intention to rant/start a flamewar on bundled
tools, sorry if I touched a nerve there.
Please let's focus on building something together, foss-style.

Cheers,
Vittorio
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