[llvm-dev] EuroLLVM BoF session: Compilers in education

[Débora Setton Sanches via llvm-dev]

Hello,

This looks really interesting! Speaking for those of us that won't be able
to attend the session in person: it would be great if you could share what
was discussed afterwards!

--
Débora.

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Roel Jordans via llvm-dev <
llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm organizing a BoF session during the upcoming EuroLLVM developers
> meeting.  As the subject of this message already shows, this session will
> be on compilers in education.  I'm currently looking for both participants
> to the discussion and input for the actual program of the session.  I've
> already got some ideas which I'll introduce below.
>
> At our university, we mostly come from a hardware and processor design
> background.  In the past we managed to design all kinds of crazy
> architecture ideas and, since we could program them by hand for our
> demonstration cases, we usually assumed that compilers could just 'do the
> trick'.  However, over the years we learned that this usually wasn't the
> case.  Looking around for what was actually being taught in compiler design
> we found that the course at our university had been teaching mostly the
> classical frontend parts (parsing etc) and was discontinued several years
> ago.  We decided it was time for us to step up and start teaching our
> students again what is and isn't possible in compilers. This time, also
> with extensions into the layers that relate more closely to the hardware so
> that the course would match our processor architecture backgrounds more
> closely.
>
> In general, the contents of this course are more or less as follows:
>  - Backend organization (optimizations, lowering, scheduling, register
> allocation)
>  - Code optimization (code analysis, loop optimizations, auto
> vectorization, Polly)
>  - Using the compiler (writing optimizer friendly code)
>  - Heterogeneous systems and high-level languages (OpenCL, OpenMP, Halide)
>
> Looking further we also found that there aren't many courses that cover
> these topics (while we think that they should be interest to the companies
> hiring our students).
>
> During this BoF, I plan to introduce the topics which we now cover in our
> course and the assignments that we give to our students to go with that.
>
> My long term goal is to make most of the materials for this course
> available to interested parties.  One idea was to transform this into some
> kind of MOOC structure when after we get the lectures tested on our own
> students (currently there are some 70 students attending this course).
> We've already automated much of the testing and grading for the exercises
> (though improvement is still possibly there).
>
> So, my questions to you:
> - Would you be interested in attending this session?
> - For industry people:
>   * what kind of skills would you like your future (or current) employees
> to have?
>   * do you have any educational materials you would be willing to share?
> - For other educators: what kind of topics do you cover in your lectures?
>   * would you be interested in presenting something about your approach?
> - And in general: are there any other things you think that should be
> discussed?
>
> Ok, that's it for now.  I've already heard from a few people that they
> would be interested but I'd love to get some more input!
>
> Best regards,
>  Roel Jordans
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