Re: source mgt. requirements solicitation

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds at transmeta dot com>]

On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, Pop Sébastian wrote:
> >
> > I may be wrong.  But I'm yet to hear a more credible explanation for
> > this simple fact.
> >
> Maybe it's true because for writing compiler optimizations one
> should have some knowledge in mathematics.

Naah. It's simple - kernels are just sexier.

Seriously, I think it's just that a kernel tends to have more different
_kinds_ of problems, and thus tend to attract different kinds of people,
and more of them.

Compilers are complicated, no doubt about that, but the complicated stuff
tends to be mostly of the same type (ie largely fairly algorithmic
transformations for the different optimization passes). In kernels, you
have many _different_ kinds of issues, and as a result you'll find more
people who are interested in one of them. So you'll find people who care
about filesystems, or people who care about memory management, or people
who find it interesting to do concurrency work or IO paths.

That is obviously also why the kernel ends up being a lot of lines of
code. I think it's about an order of magnitude bigger in size than all of
gcc - not because it is an order of magnitude more complex, obviously, but
simply because it has many more parts to it. And that directly translates
to more pieces that people can cut their teeth on.

> Maybe we're wrong but the percentage of mathematicians who contribute
> to GCC could be slightly bigger than for LK.

I don't think you're wrong per se. The "transformation" kind of code is
just much more common in a compiler, and the kind of people who work on it
are more likely to be the mathematical kind of people. It's not the only
part of gcc, obviously (I think parsing is underrated, and I'm happy that
the preprocessing front-end has gotten so much attention in the last few
years), but it's one of the bigger parts.

And people clearly seek out projects that satisfy their interests.

		Linus