Re: Notes from the GROW'10 workshop panel (GCC research opportunities workshop)

[Toon Moene <toon@moene.org>]

Nathan Froyd wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:30:44AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote:

>> To attract new developers, GCC needs to modernize its internal
>> structure.  I have some thoughts on that, but progress has been slow,
>> due mostly to resource constraints.
> 
> Would you mind expanding--even just a little bit--on what bits need
> modernizing?  There's things like:

That's the wrong red herring :-)

Diego is afraid that GCC can't attract new developers - and he 
subsequently blames it on its bad structure.

I have seen this argument before.  It is bandied about by the Weather 
Forecasting Project I'm a researcher for: "We can't interest the 
academic world to help us because our code is incomprehensible !"

But, what happens is a combination of the following factors:

1. Academics have to plead to get our code and sign a contract never
    to use it for actual weather forecasting.

2. There is a well known US Weather Forecasting model (WRF, pronounce:
    WARF) that you can just download, comes with extensive documentation
    and an enormous user base, user support by users, etc., because of
    this.

So my solution to the Weather Forecasting model development problem 
would be: Let academia use WRF, we read their publications and decide 
which ideas to implement in our own model (instead of running around 
like headless chickens claiming that no-one wants to work with our 
model).  We have enough paid people (in 25-odd national weather services 
in Europe) to work on our model.

Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for GCC: There might be too many hurdles 
to use GCC in academia.  So what - the number of companies working on 
GCC have enough clout to employ the necessary base of engineers to keep 
GCC going (and, for an extra bonus - they do not have to invest in 
Fortran, because that's run by volunteers :-)

Case closed.

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html