[Gomp-discuss] Housekeeping

[Biagio Lucini]

Dear All,

        I have added Jacob to the developers of the project. He plans to do 
some 
housekeeping following what he has exposed in his TODO (which by the way 
makes a lot of sense to me).

Jacob's letter gave me also another opportunity to think why we haven't done 
so much 'till now. One obvious reason is lack of personal time by almost all 
of us, and there is nothing one can do about it. But in my opinion there are 
other reasons easier to deal with. The problem so far is that we have been 
planning to write a very genera framework for parallelisation, but almost 
no-one knows how to do it. So, let's fly lower and redefine our target.
I suggest we focus our efforts on Linux, defining our objectives step by step.
If there is some interest for some other architecture, someone will step in 
and contribute. Obviously the risk of not being generic enough is that you 
might have to go through several rewriting. I am prepared to pay this price, 
if this will lead to a correct parsing of hello_omp.c in a relatively short 
time. 

As you have said countless times, the obvious areas of intervention are:
a) frontends
b) lib
c) middle-end

I would leave aside (c) for a moment and resolve possible conflicts in the 
optimisation step by imposing the -O0 flag to every compiled program.

The development of the lib can be done independently of anything else, while
the development of the frontends can build on the stubs. Without going too 
much ahead, I propose that we endorse the 0.1 plan proposed by Jacob for the 
frontends, while complete freedom is left for the moment on the libs.

Since we have to play with our own strengths,  we don't want to build the most 
elegant implementation around nor want we to have the most efficient. Let's 
have something that Just Works (TM).

Opinion, corrections and insults in this list, please :-)

Cheers
Biagio
 




-- 
=========================================================

Biagio Lucini                                 
Institut Fuer Theoretische Physik
ETH Hoenggerberg      
CH-8093 Zuerich - Switzerland           
Tel. +41 (0)1 6332562  
 
=========================================================