[cfe-dev] GSoD: analyzer checker docs?

[Artem Dergachev via cfe-dev]

Mm, writing actual in-depth analyzer doc for developers in GSoD would be 
pretty hard unless we pick, say, Kristóf as our technical writer. Even 
throughout GSoC, where studends who spend 3 months working on the 
analyzer in practice, by the end of the summer they often don't gather 
enough understanding to start writing this sort of docs. We can't expect 
an outside technical writer (who's not necessarily that much of a 
programmer) to dive into this so quickly.

I also feel that we don't need someone else's help with our 
documentation for developers: we're writing good documentation 
ourselves, we just need to put it together somehow. It is the skill of 
writing documentation for regular users that, i think, we all are missing.


On 4/19/19 6:58 PM, Devin Coughlin wrote:
> I think we should try to focus the Google Summer of Documentation 
> project on documenting aspects of the analyzer that would benefit our 
> users. There are a lot more of them than there are of us analyzer 
> developers!
>
> One area that would be great to improve on is describing for our 
> important checkers:
> * What bugs does the checker find?
> * Why are the bugs important?
> * How should the bugs be fixed?
> * How should false positives be suppressed?
>
> The GSoD project is an amazing resource — we should take advantage of 
> it to improve our users’ experience of the analyzer.
>
> Devin
>
>> On Apr 19, 2019, at 4:37 PM, Kristóf Umann <dkszelethus at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:dkszelethus at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Sounds like the thing we always needed in my opinion! The analyzer 
>> could really use some better docs in certain areas -- speaking from 
>> personal experience, I always thought that I just need more time to 
>> learning about the codebase before being able to understand patches 
>> related to, for example, liveness analysis. It wasn't until I 
>> attended Gábor Horváth's advanced compilers lectures at my 
>> university, when I understood that that is in fact something that 
>> exists in the literature, and the thing that we have in the analyzer 
>> is "merely" an implementation of it. I really liked what he said 
>> during the Birds of a Feather meeting on EuroLLVM, is that we do have 
>> many things documented, but it's scattered all over the place in 
>> youtube videos, cfe-dev mails, patch review discussions, bugzilla 
>> reports (especially before 2012) and the like. If under GSoD we could 
>> get this sorted out, get rid of most of HTML files we have on 
>> https://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/, and have an easy-to-navigate, 
>> easy-to-extend documentation for the long term, it would be far more 
>> inviting for newcomers as well. I might be biased, but the Clang 
>> Static Analyzer is very cool project, and I think if we made the 
>> transition from writing your first checker to making changes in the 
>> actual infrastructure a little easier, we would have a a lot easier 
>> time building a community around it.
>>
>> Couple thoughts of mine, I haven't read through the entire GSoD 
>> procedure thought.
>>
>> On Sat, 20 Apr 2019 at 03:12, Artem Dergachev <noqnoqneo at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:noqnoqneo at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Tanya made this call for Google thing of Docs, which is like
>>     summer of
>>     code just for docs
>>     (http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2019-April/062121.html).
>>     There's been a lot of work on checker docs in the Analyzer
>>     recently. Do
>>     we want to take this opportunity?
>>
>>     Like, if it gives us a nice, stylish, easy-to-understand, on-point
>>     description of what the checker thinks the user's code is doing
>>     and how
>>     bad does it think it is, it might be pretty neat.
>>
>

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