Meeting 2017 09 24

Via Skype, 2017-08-30 1030R

On the Call:

• Karim Ali (UAlberta)
• Yaser Alkayale (UCOSP - Dalhousie)
• Jeff Cho (UAlberta)
• Julian Dolby (IBM)
• Ronny Mondal (UCOSP - Brock)
• Chen Song (UCOSP - SFU)
• Lydia Wu (UCOSP - SFU)

Work Log

• Karim will set up Wiki workspaces for everyone to continually update their progress and project work for the weekly meetings
• Yaser proposes a format for tracking which he will send out over the Slack

Project Assignments

• Karim and Jeff will go over the ValueKinds that require support and add them as Issues in swift-wala. Everyone can pick a task, assign it to themselves, work on it, and keep notes
• Very large instruction set for Swift - 170ish, but it is still fewer than Java bytecode - various different types for Java, eg half a dozen load instructions
• Maybe working on tasks in groups of two? Could be difficult for coordination. Perhaps a solution is working on similar types of instructions so they can still bounce ideas off each other but don't need to work in parallel
• Whomever is adding support for whichever instruction type, also writes the unit tests for them
• WALA Casts have particular ways of handling control flow - Julian should walk people through existing ways that the frontend currently handles that. A Doodle will go out for scheduling this info session
• Function calls will also be more involved in terms of sending to WALA - representing the function references, figure out what makes the most sense
• Branching instructions - on WALA, labeled instructions set as jump targets, for example. Hopefully can still keep it as a one way flow of information from compiler to WALA instead of passing back info about what nodes correspond to what SIL Basic Block
• Send Slack invites for wala-swift (done)
• Swift type system, class hierarchy, etc - look at Java frontend as an example; this requires a different node structure, CastType (next week info session with Julian)
• Start with simple type support for the time being, learn WALA concepts as we go, then add support for more complex stuff like load and store and branch

Weekly Meetings

• Karim will send out a Doodle for scheduling weekly meetings and we'll pick something that works for the most people
• We could possibly split meetings (Julian meets with east, Karim/Jeff meet with west) but this is not preferable