Re: volunteer to help with Fortran

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

Mikey wrote to gcc@:
> I'd like to offer to help with Gnu Fortran development.
Great! Note, there is a GNU Fortran mailinglist fortran@ to which I CC
this answer, which is more appropriate than the gcc@ list for GNU
Fortran discussions.

> Please would you let me know in what areas volunteer help is needed,
> and I can then tell you which areas fit in with my expertise.

Well, everywhere; depending on your interest and skills (with no special
emphasis and in no special order):

- Documentation (user and internal manual)
- Bugfixing (search for bugs filled against Fortran and libgfortran)
- Diagnostics support (report uninitialized variables at run time etc.)
- Generating faster code
- Fortran 2003 work
- Finding bugs and creating test cases for them

Note that you need to sign a copyright assignment; otherwise only really
trivial patches can be accepted
http://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html#legal

> I like working on apple macs, and I think I know them fairly well, but
> also have a couple of pcs if necessary.
Mac is good as I think we don't have so many Mac-based developers yet.
(The more and the more obscure operating systems the better as
especially Linux ia32 and x86-64 are well covered. Not that OS X is that
obscure.)

Otherwise the Fortran front end itself is rather system independent;
only libgfortran is a bit more system dependent.

> I live in London - as my wife is Dutch we pop across to Holland a few
> times every year, so in case you wanted to meet up, that's not a problem.
I think so far most Fortran peoples have not met personally only via IRC
(though I wouldn't mind to meet the others in flesh and blood).

> Are you going to proceed with a Fortran 200x project? If so, is that
> an area where you need volunteer assistance?
Yes, the midterm goal is that gfortran is a full-featured Fortran 2003
compiler. Some missing bits can be found at
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Fortran2003

I would suggest (can be in parallel):
- Obtain the copyright assignment form
- Find a small (or tiny) project to get familiar with the gfortran
internals - and with the patch submission procedure and coding style
- Choose an area where you want to work on. If you tell us your skills,
we may suggest some areas or give some tips to a chosen project.

Currently, we would like most is to have no bugs marked with the keyword
"wrong-code" or "rejects-valid"; however, any contribution is welcome!

Tobias