[cfe-commits] [cfe-dev] Cilk Plus Extension for Clang

[Douglas Gregor]

On Nov 6, 2012, at 7:35 PM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Douglas Gregor" <dgregor at apple.com>
>> To: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>
>> Cc: "Chandler Carruth" <chandlerc at google.com>, cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu, "llvm cfe" <cfe-commits at cs.uiuc.edu>
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 3:57:25 PM
>> Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] [cfe-commits] Cilk Plus Extension for Clang
>> 
>> 
>> On Nov 6, 2012, at 10:04 AM, Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:

>>> Vendors should commit to ongoing support of their work, but we
>>> should not otherwise have a 'pay to play' policy.
>> 
>> 
>> It's not 'pay to play', it's a meritocracy. You have to prove both
>> that you're willing and that you are able to provide ongoing support
>> for your own extensions in Clang. The larger, more experimental, or
>> more niche the extension is, the higher the burden to prove
>> continuing support. Statements of commitment hold no sway for a
>> community that will be tasked with ongoing maintenance if you don't
>> live up to your commitment.
> 
> I was specifically responding to Chandler's statement, "Then, for Intel contributors to join and engage the Clang community, taking on significant maintenance work and other upstream development tasks." This very clearly sounds like saying that they need to help us with other stuff first, and moreover, "significant maintenance work" implies significant cost. That is pay-to-play. You may define meritocracy partially in terms of resource commitment, and that's valid, but still implies a cost to the contributor.
> 
> My point is that we should not be looking for "significant maintenance work and other upstream development tasks" from them to prove themselves. Ongoing maintenance of their extension in an open public repository, with good code quality, docs and tests, and a positive interaction with the community should be enough. 


I disagree, at least in part. I think a company as large as Intel, if it wants to contribute such a large vendor-specific extension, does need to prove that it understands how to work well with the open-source community. It is not a process that comes naturally to organizations of that size. They can engage the community either by making general improvements to Clang, or with targeted refactoring and improvements that enable their extension (which are also general goodness for Clang), but there must be *something*. We simply can't take a massive code dump on a promise.

	- Doug