Ideas for students' summer projects

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 5/22/18 10:00 PM, Mike Franklin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 May 2018 at 16:27:05 UTC, Eduard Staniloiu wrote:
> 
>> Let the brainstorming begin!
> 
> An apprentice for Walter.
> 
> I think Walter needs an apprentice (or 10).  Too much knowledge about 
> D's design decisions, present, and future are locked up in his mind.  He 
> needs to be disseminating his knowledge, training the next generation of 
> D maintainers, and widening the bottleneck that currently exists for 
> fixing bugs and evolving the language.

I was actually thinking, we need really a layman's explanation of how 
things work in the compiler. I'm not sure this requires apprenticeship, 
it may just need more documentation.

Common questions I have when looking at dmd code:

Where is this in the source?
How do I know I'm in a function?
How do I know I'm in a template?
What module am I in?
How do I know what has been run?
What is the proper way to generate lowered code?

I recently fixed a bug in DMD for the first time at dconf. The PR still 
hasn't been merged yet, but I'm confident about the fix.

But I really only was able to fix this because the way the code was 
written -- essentially it was a string mixin, and I could see where the 
error was in the string. But it took ALL DAY to find it. Knowing where 
to look is hugely important (and I would never have found it without the 
help of several people during the hackathon), but also knowing what you 
are looking at is hugely important.

-Steve