Hi David,
Great to hear that you want to take care of the matcher. yes, you will surely learn a few things about the Scala compiler, especially frontend stuff, types, desugarings and the abstract representations. oh, and optimization of pattern matching.
Though i don't have time to hack myself, feel free to ask me if you get stuck or if you are wondering why things have been implemented in the way they are now.
Throwing test cases at it sounds good, fixing the recently discussed exhaustiveness and null related bug should not be too hard either.
Burak
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 7:01 PM, David MacIver
<david.maciver@...> wrote:
I note from http://www.scala-lang.org/node/292 that the Scala pattern
matcher is currently lacking a maintainer. I'd be interested in the
role, as I've been looking for a good opportunity to to get properly
to grips with the Scala compiler and this looks like a nice self
contained area of it that I'm interested in.
As suggested by the above, I'm not exactly the most experienced
compiler developer in the world (more accurately: I've skimmed a few
books on the subject and meant to do more but have never actually
gotten around to playing with any code except for one patch submitted
to the Scala compiler), but I think I'd do a reasonably good job at
this. If nothing else the pattern matcher would benefit from the huge
pile of tests I'd throw at it because I was terrified of breaking
anything. :-)
--
Burak Emir
--
http://burak.emir.googlepages.com