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

[Roel Jordans via llvm-dev]

Hi Débora,

That shouldn't be a problem.  There will be notes taken during the session.

Cheers,
  Roel

On 11/03/16 19:09, Débora Setton Sanches wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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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