[cfe-dev] "clang.org"

[Chris Lattner]

On Nov 12, 2013, at 8:29 PM, Sean Silva <silvas at purdue.edu> wrote:

> 
> Actually I'm really curious about the "users" that clang.org serves, and I think it would be useful to take those use cases to heart and improve the normal releases correspondingly. E.g. you mentioned somewhere else that the download on clang.org is code signed? is that something that users would appreciate and that we should integrate into our regular release process?. You also mentioned some stuff like a GUI AST viewer, and nodejs bindings? Are users really digging those? I think those last two would be great to move closer to upstream regardless.
> 
> Also I just wanted to mention Alp, that you've been doing a great job interacting with the community and our development process (incremental development, tests, code review, etc.). (well, this strangeclang.org scenario aside (although in the end I'm glad that domain is in "friendly hands" and not a squatter or porn ads!))

I think that Alp made a really good point: "Clang" is a developer-facing product that a lot more developers interact with than compiler engineers.  llvm.org and even clang.llvm.org are really focused on bringing people into the open source community and serving us compiler hackers, but it does a really poor job serving users that just want to use a compiler and look up a few options or language extensions.  Oh, and the main web page could really use an update, being almost unmodified since its inception.

In many ways, this is the same problem that projects like Eclipse have.  Since eclipse is both a community and an IDE, the main "http://www.eclipse.org" web site is pretty useless for people who just want a Java IDE.  I'm not finding any great examples of open source projects "doing it right", but linux.com for example is targeted as users and advocates of the linux OS, not at kernel hackers.

I think it could be really great to have a user-centric landing page, and if we do that, making clang.org be it would be truly great.

-Chris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20131112/b7fe6cf6/attachment.html>