Re: [RFC] Contributing tree-ssa to mainline

[Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot de>]

Steven Bosscher <s.bosscher@student.tudelft.nl> writes:

> On Saturday 17 January 2004 14:37, Richard Kenner wrote:
>>     If we want to develop a GCC 3.5 release without Tree-SSA, then we
>>     should have specific, non-SSA feature goals that we want to
>>     accomplish.  Otherwise, what is the benefit of GCC 3.5 over additional
>>     point releases of GCC 3.4 stable branch?
>>
>> I don't understand your point.  Since GCC is a volunteer project, there is
>> no practical way of forming such "goals" or schedules.  We presume, unless
>> there's evidence to the contrary that people are going to be working on
>> improvements to GCC into the future.
>
> That is what everyone is saying every time somebody suggests we should
> have goals for the next release.
>
> Result: everyone just starts hacking without any form of plan, and we
> end up with lots of half-finished efforts.
>
> It is OK to say: "For this release our goals are...".  Get a good number
> of people (volunteers) to agree on that, and you can make those goals.
> Do nothing, and nothing happens.

I agree.  Let's write down which goals we want to have - and strive to
get them done.  If we figure out after some time that some goals are
not realistic in our timeframe, then move them to the next release
(so, we always have two lists: one for current release and one for the
release afterwards).  But having some goals that are understood, helps
to concentrate effort and gives developers some ideas what they should
do.

For example some goals might be:

For 3.5:
- variable tracking
- Tree-SSA with:
  * at least same performance as 3.4
  * published interfaces between frontends and middle-end
- Fortran95 front-end
- ...

After 3.6:
- vectorization
- ...

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj
  SuSE Linux AG, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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