From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16718 invoked by alias); 30 Jun 2011 09:39:21 -0000 Received: (qmail 16705 invoked by uid 22791); 30 Jun 2011 09:39:20 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_05,DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID,FREEMAIL_FROM,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_LOW,T_TO_NO_BRKTS_FREEMAIL X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail-yw0-f47.google.com (HELO mail-yw0-f47.google.com) (209.85.213.47) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:39:05 +0000 Received: by ywa12 with SMTP id 12so934692ywa.20 for ; Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:39:04 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.236.189.69 with SMTP id b45mr2269371yhn.293.1309426744803; Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:39:04 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.236.109.142 with HTTP; Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:39:04 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:14:00 -0000 Message-ID: Subject: GSOC - Student Rondup From: Philip Herron To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-IsSubscribed: yes Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org X-SW-Source: 2011-06/txt/msg00394.txt.bz2 Hey all, I was talking on IRC the other day with others and we thought this would be a nice idea, to ask all GSOC students how were all getting on working within GCC. As i am sure you have noticed GCC is a pretty big piece of code and it can be hard to get to grips with it all. I am kind of lucky because i was on GSOC last year and spent most of the summer if not all just getting comfortable with it. So i thought we could use this as a thread to introduce us a students to each other I'll go first! My name is Philip Herron I'm from Ireland and i got inspired by Paul Biggars work into PHC http://www.phpcompiler.org/ to implement a python front-end to gcc. Its hard but just something i find interesting more than anything. I'm am getting on quite well with my project, spent last week after the GCC meet-up in London cleaning up my IL and now i am implementing my own pass system as i have to iterate several passes over my IL (for various reasons) before i generate GENERIC. As i was on GCC last year i thought i would share things i found to be helpful when you encounter a problem: 1 - Work at it for max 1 day on your own but definitely try to join our irc on irc.oftc.net #gcc and ask. If you still find no help send a mail to gcc-help 2 - gcc -save-temps can be helpful now and again when working with alot of macros 3 - ack-grep is very helpful: http://betterthangrep.com/ makes searching though code much easier than learning to use grep properly :P 4 - Don't be afraid to ask questions as often as possible on irc and to your mentor I've bugged my mentor Ian with alot of really stupid small things all the time :) but they don't bite. And just finally i thought i would ask what aspects have you found within gcc hard to get to grips with if at all, it could be interesting to see if there is any correlation between areas. Personally i found getting to grips with Makefiles properly was hard i used to rely on automake for everything before. And learning to figure out how to use the generic tree api was confusing but in the end its very simple. We've found not all students are on irc its a really great platform to ask questions very informally its worth getting used to you can use web clients like mibbet irc or firefox extensions, i use irssi but those clients are much more friendly. Hope everyone's project is going well and your comfortable or getting more comfortable with what your doing! :) Happy Coding! --Phil PS: what do you think of the idea if we have a thread like this every few weeks or sooner (maybe on irc)? Just to see if we can help each other etc?