[cfe-commits] Fw: Re: [PATCH] First OpenMP patch

[Andrey Bokhanko]

Chandler,

> Sorry that this got lost Hal, but I have said on another thread about this
> patch (but with a different author) that I don't really think we should add
> documentation and the beginnings of support for -fopen-mp without first
> having a clear discussion and document describing the expected design of
> OpenMP support in Clang.

While personally I do support this "design everything before writing a
line of code" approach, I'm surprised (and, to be frank, frustrated)
to see this raised only now, after a whole month of code review and a
lot of effort already put both by patch developers (Mahesha and
Alexey) and reviewers (Dmitri and Hal).

Either way, there were a lot of OpenMP-related discussions in last
several months. It seems that while everyone considers OpenMP support
to be desirable for LLVM, opinions on how to handle it in the compiler
back-end differs.

That's why back in October 9th Mahesha (original author of the patch)
started a discussion on support in Clang FE only
(http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-October/024842.html).

He got the following suggestion from Eli
(http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-October/024843.html):

> If you have patches that implement useful functionality; please submit
> sooner rather than later.  Doing a bunch of work in a private branch
> will mean more work for you in the long run because you won't get any
> feedback.

While this definitely differs from "design everything before writing a
line of code" approach, it seemed to be a reasonable suggestion. It
still is.

> Essentially, I think this patch is starting ast step 2, 3, or 4 rather than
> step 1.

I can't find a message from you in any existing OpenMP-related
threads. Perhaps you are referring to this
(http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20121105/067626.html)
message in CilkPlus thread? Then your "step 1" is:

> 1) Cilk Plus is a proprietary language feature specified, controlled,
> and implemented by a single vendor (Intel). It does not seem
> sufficiently general to be of interest to the entire Clang
> community[3] in its current form.

It is not relevant to OpenMP at all.

Yours,
Andrey Bokhanko
=============
Software Engineer
Intel Compiler Team