Graphite news

[Tobias Grosser]

On 02/09/2012 11:37 PM, Tobias Grosser wrote:
> On 02/09/2012 11:05 PM, Vladimir Makarov wrote:
>> On 02/09/2012 07:42 AM, Tobias Grosser wrote:
>>>
>>> == Who will do all the work? ==
>>>
>>> After reading all the open projects you may wander who will do all the
>>> work? Unfortunately Sebastian switched jobs at the end of 2011, such
>>> that we lost one full time contributor. Furthermore, I am myself also
>>> not full time working on Graphite, but work on my PhD where I am
>>> founded to work on the LLVM Polly project. This means developer
>>> resources are currently rare.
>>>
>>> To solve this issue, I believe the best approach is to share as much
>>> infrastructure as possible between different projects.
>>
>> I just thought about licensing. If you are going to share the code
>> between GCC and LLVM, who will be the owner (FSF or UIUC). But may be I
>> understood you incorrectly and you meant only libraries (isl etc).
>
> Both. Libraries are simple, as they are just used. For code I can only
> share code that I have written. That means, if I have written code I can
> add it at both places. If people start to contribute, moving code
> becomes more difficult. However, I assume that most of the stuff that
> can be shared will actually be part of isl, and only compiler specific
> stuff goes into GCC and LLVM. So I do not expect that a lot of code
> needs to be moved later on.

Or maybe I should be more specific.

I think the stuff that can actually be shared are polyhedral concepts 
and algorithms. Those are mathematical algorithms which are so high 
level that they are compiler independent. For Graphite and Polly itself 
I do not see too much code reuse. Obviously they will share some 
techniques and ideas, but the actual implementation will strongly depend 
on the compiler it is built for. Here we have not only different coding 
styles and conventions, but also different needs how we interact with 
the rest of the compilers, which heuristics we choose and how in general 
we use the polyhedral techniques. I have earlier implemented some 
algorithms for both compiler, but as soon as they are pushed upstream 
they slowly start to diverge and to adapt to what is best for each 
compiler. From that on I believe the sharing will most probably happen 
by sharing experience and ideas, not actual code. Not having the same 
code base will also allow both projects to explore new directions 
individually, which may result in useful ideas for both.

Cheers
Tobi