Re: [rvm-research] Researching the Jikes RVM

Hi,

On 04.04.2013 02:34, Kathiravelu Pradeeban wrote:
> I have merged the previous effort on Compressor [1] to the current trunk
> locally, and have attached the mercurial diff file herewith
> (compressor.diff). [...] I hope the attached patch will help anyone who would like
> to try the compressor implementation quickly, by applying the diff to
> the current trunk. I didn't use the diffs uploaded to the Google Site
> (GSoC), [...]. However, I cross-checked with the diff files to
> confirm the files.

Thanks for doing this. The patch applies cleanly to trunk and is very
helpful for checking the current state of the compressor.

If you want to provide an updated version of the diff in the future, it
should also contain configs for the compressor, at least something like
BaseBaseCompressor.

Google will announce the accepted mentoring organizations for GSoC 2013
on April 8 2013 at 19:00 UTC (next monday) and student applications will
start two weeks later on April 22 2013 at 19:00 UTC. That's why I'd like
to highlight potential work that could be done on the diff before the
coding period starts. As you have already discovered, there have been
some changes in MMTk since the original compressor implementation was
written. There have also been some coding style changes in the mean
time. The following work could be done on the diff to make it more
suitable as a basis for the coding period:

a) The diff currently doesn't comply with the checkstyle rules.
Compliance with the checkstyle rules is mandatory for all code committed
to the main repository. You can enable checkstyle by using
"--checkstyle" if you're using buildit or setting the
"require.checkstyle" property if you're using Ant.

The most common checkstyle failures are tabs (we only use spaces) and
whitespace at the end of lines. If you're using an IDE, you can probably
configure it to trim the whitespace and replace the tabs automatically.
Some hints for Eclipse are provided at
http://www.jikesrvm.org/Editing+JikesRVM+in+an+IDE in the section "Setup
for easier compliance with the Checkstyle rules".

b) Remove useless comments. Comments that are copied from overriden
methods without any changes can be safely removed (JavaDoc will just
copy the text from the overriden methods). For comments that are only
partly copied, {@inheritDoc} may be useful.

c) @Override annotations need to be added.

d) Update the documentation of the Compressor (e.g. the JavaDoc for the
Compressor class is copied from org.jikesrvm.plan.SS). I'd also like to
see package-level comments for all Jikes RVM packages in the long run,
so it would be nice if the Compressor already came with a package-info.java.

You don't need to do any of this right now (after all, we haven't even
been accepted as a mentoring organization yet). You could deal with
these issues before or at the start of the coding period, provided that
the Jikes RVM project and you are accepted for GSoC.


Kind regards,

Erik Brangs

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