[llvm-dev] Email list just for front end developers?

Thu May 11 03:14:11 PDT 2017

FWIW, I think the "modern" way of doing any of this is with any one of the following services (that don't need to be owned/maintained by the LLVM Foundation):

  - Stack Overflow (maybe if it gets large enough, get a "vertical" for just LLVM usage)
  - Reddit (if there isn't an /r/llvm yet, that might be a good "community" place for less llvm-dev worthy material)
  - Slack (if there isn't one yet, maybe an llvm-users slack instance for more persistent discussions)

I suspect none of this has to get the blessing of the llvm-dev@ members nor the foundation, and if there indeed are a lot of people that might benefit from these resources, then you would have started that community for the users.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

> On 7 May 2017, at 23:43, Perry E. Metzger via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 6 May 2017 21:38:50 -0700 Sanjoy Das
> <sanjoy at playingwithpointers.com <mailto:sanjoy at playingwithpointers.com>> wrote:
>> Hi Perry,
>> 
>> On Sat, May 6, 2017 at 2:55 PM, Perry E. Metzger
>> <perry at piermont.com> wrote:
>>>> Let me put it this way -- I'm pretty sure if you take it on
>>>> yourself to answer beginner questions on llvm-dev promptly,
>>>> nobody will *complain*.  In fact, you're going to make some
>>>> folks happy. :)
>>> 
>>> Sure, but who will answer mine? Part of the reason I asked about
>>> this was selfish, as I'd like access to other people in the same
>>> situation as me who might know answers. (I don't think the people
>>> here now will want to answer more questions, and many of my
>>> questions doubtless border on inanely stupid but for the fact
>>> that it is hard to find answers in the docs.)
>> 
>> I don't see how people who don't have time to answer on llvm-dev
>> will find time to answer on some other mailing list.
> 
> My belief was they would be different populations. That is why there
> would be a separate list. The other list would attract mostly front
> end devs. I would expect front end devs would be both more interested
> in a list that discusses mostly things they care about (including IR
> changes they need to be aware of) and more interested in mutual
> assistance.
> 
> But never mind, it seems that I'm the only person who likes that idea,
> so we're ignoring that possibility for the moment.
> 
>>> That said, I'm willing to give it a try, as an experiment. How
>>> long should we attempt it for? If that's reasonably agreed to,
>>> I'll
>> 
>> Depends on how much time you have -- that's the limiting resource
>> here.
> 
> By time I meant the question of how long one tries a strategy before
> deciding to look for new strategies. :) Given that few questions about
> front end things arrive on the -dev list, trying to help answering
> them, for the moment, will only require that I attend more closely to
> the postings, and that other people make a bit of an effort to answer
> "dumb questions" as well.
> 
> Hopefully that will simply work. My skepticism comes from the feeling
> that if it was really going to work, it would have already, but
> there's no reason not to give it a good faith try.
> 
> On the wider issue:
> 
> LLVM has been transformative. There are now a lot more people
> experimenting with compiling languages than ever before (including
> me!) because LLVM removes a lot of the pain from constructing
> everything past the IR.
> 
> However, until I started working with it personally, I didn't
> understand how much work it was to learn how to use it, and much of
> that work is because there is a very big gap between the programmers
> guide + the tutorial (which makes it all look like you can learn the
> whole thing in an afternoon) and what you actually need to figure out
> to get things done. Much of what you need you have to puzzle out
> painstakingly on your own, trying to make sense of the doxygen docs
> and reading code, because there's less written down than one would
> hope. Even the IR language reference, which is seemingly complete at
> first glance, has some big gaps in it.
> 
> Given good enough resources, though, even more people could be using
> LLVM to create compilers, which would be a great thing. And,
> selfishly, given better resources, my own work would be easier. :)
> Thus my overall interest.
> 
>> However, I liked your idea of maintaining a wiki-like thing.  Both
>> http://llvm.org/docs/Frontend/PerformanceTips.html <http://llvm.org/docs/Frontend/PerformanceTips.html> and
>> http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/ <http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/> will be good additions there.
> 
> Parts of the programmer's manual
> http://llvm.org/docs/ProgrammersManual.html <http://llvm.org/docs/ProgrammersManual.html> are also essential, though
> for a front end developer, especially one using the C API, not
> everything is something you want to know, and it isn't initially
> obvious when you need to read closely.
> 
> Anyway, given that you would prefer for it not to be an actual wiki,
> what would be lower barrier to entry and Wiki-ish?
> 
> (A big issue with the current workflow, I think, is that for outsiders
> submitting documentation updates the process is very heavyweight. Even
> the use of svn vs. git increases the amount of work for casual users.
> It's just not worth it as it stands for someone to say "hey, please
> fix just this one sentence", especially if you've never contributed to
> LLVM before. However, often even single sentence edits improve
> comprehension. Having a low barrier for small fixes is one of the
> reasons Wikipedia grew so fast. Of course, it is also the reason that
> policing Wikipedia takes huge effort, so there's a tradeoff.)
> 
> 
> Perry
> -- 
> Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com <mailto:perry at piermont.com>
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-- Dean

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