The Schrödinger's Contributor

Merged This Week

• wrapper for fs operations
• short-ice
• symlinked-extern, symlinked-rlib and symlinked-libraries
• pgo-branch-weights, finally!

Opened This Week

• inaccessible-temp-dir, output-with-hyphens and issue-10971-temps-dir
• intrinsic-unreachable, sepcomp-cci-copies, sepcomp-inlining and sepcomp-separate
• issue-64153, invalid-staticlib and no-builtins-lto
• std-core-cycle, obey-crate-type-flag, mixing-libs and issue-18943
• extern-flag-fun, incremental-debugger-visualiser and incremental-session-fail
• error-found-staticlib-instead-crate, output-filename-conflicts-with-directory, output-filename-overwrites-input, native-link-modifier-verbatim-rustc and native-link-verbatim-linker
• separate-link, separate-link-fail and allocator-shim-circular-deps

Still Open

• link-arg, link-dedup and clear-error-blank-output, which is currently in the merge queue.
• nm implementation + bin-emit-no-symbols, which I have barely touched. Maybe there's an opportunity to use llvm_readobj as seen in #126534.
• link-args-order, ls-metadata and lto-readonly-lib, which needs #126279's test_while_readonly implementation.
• compiler-lookup-paths, dump-mono-stats and prune-link-args, whose original Makefile's ability to succeed on Windows despite its complete disregard for OS-specific library filenames is beyond science.

run-make Makefiles remaining in master repository: 246/349 - 29.5% complete

Just who are these open source contributors? What drives them forwards?

I can comprehend coming home after a day of chasing around bugs and patching pipelines to knit a sweater or build 18th century miniature sailboat replicas. First, neither of those things require a screen, and second, the skills they require, while difficult to acquire, are not as specialized as compiler development.

So, how does one come home after doing a lot of a thing to do more of that thing? What is the grand conspiracy? Unemployed college students? Sneaking in some PRs during the workday? Lucid dreaming brain-chip coding? The run-make CI will get really fun when I start having to adapt to the x86-neuralink architecture.

What are the demographics? Is it a "young person" or an "old person" thing? When you ask me to imagine an "open source coder", I have this Schrödinger's vision of a superposed 80 year old ancient lich polishing their phylactery full of homebrewed pure-C data structures and algorithms, and a 20 year old wearing the traditional cultist robes of one of the many Internet subculture conclaves available to them.

Wretched thing - I am the former. The perfect recruit. Even though this test-porting business is quite repetitive... I'm quite enjoying it. It's honestly just the digital version of using a vacuum cleaner in a suffocatingly dusty room. Some of these Makefiles truly have formulas inscribed upon them which would shatter any sane mind...

But, I am immune, for I have already excluded myself from sanity in the first place by volunteering to embark on this project.