[LLVMdev] technical debt

[Daniel Berlin]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 7:53 PM, reed kotler <rkotler at mips.com> wrote:
> On 06/04/2012 03:25 PM, Daniel Berlin wrote:
>>
>> I'm pretty sure neither llvm nor clang have any technical debt at all.
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 5:18 PM, reed kotler<rkotler at mips.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> something to think about as llvm and clang grows.
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
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>
> I hope you are joking.
>

Why would I be joking?

> It's not meant as a criticism of llvm or clang but there is already an
> enormous amount
> of technical debt.

I don't see that.

>
> It's something to try and get a handle on before it gets out of hand.
The consequences will never be the same
>
> Documentation is one area where it is accumulating fast but there are
> others.

I think LLVM is incredibly well documented
> Testing is another area.

It also has at least 10-15 tests.
> Tablegen alone has huge technical debt.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
>
> To me, there should be a cap placed on the number of lines of code in llvm.

Will there be a credit offset system?
> Like a budget. We should try and rewrite and refactor to keep the number of
> lines from growing
> without bound.
>
> At this point lots of patterns should be developing where other tools (like
> tablegen) could be
> written to reduce the amount of code and make things more understandable.

I agree. We should macroize most of the passes so they aren't so wordy.

>
> Reed
>