Re: source mgt. requirements solicitation

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

> 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.

Right, and the interesting things is that, by careful design, these
kinds of issues are almost completely orthogonal, so that for example,
it is fine to work on a file system knowing nothing about process
management at the low level (well not 100% fine, but close to it).

My experience is that in compilers, things tend to be much more interlinked,
especially when dealing with complex languages, so local changes without
a full understanding of the semantic environment often have unexpected
consequences. Nevertheless there are still some well defined break downs
(e.g. front end vs back end vs run time library).