Compiler Team Survey Results Meeting (part 2)

[wesleywiser]

Meeting proposal info

• Title: Compiler Team Survey Results Meeting (part 2)
• Type: non-technical

Summary

Finish the discussion started about the results of the compiler team survey.

The three high-level issues @pnkfelix identified that we ran out of time to discuss in the first meeting:

1. Long standing problems going unaddressed (or hard to track progress thereof; lack of status updates)

2. Worker drain and lack of bandwidth.

3. Change-to-test cycle is too long (more broadly, everything is too high latency)

Specific notes from the survey results

1. Long standing problems going unaddressed (or hard to track progress thereof; lack of status updates)

   • Making it clear (or easier to identify) when an issue is blocked on a well-known pre-existing problem, e.g. lazy-normalization

   • Lack of regular retrospectives

   • Lots of projects but many are moving very slowly. Creates impression that nothing is happening.

2. Worker drain and lack of bandwidth

   • Contributor and paid-employee drain is worrisome

   • Lack of leadership bandwidth

   • Lack of mentoring bandwidth

   • Not sure we have workforce to accomplish all things that lang team designs. Recent acquistion of T-libs impl may add to this problem.

   • Risk of burnout.

3. Change-to-test cycle is too long (more broadly, everything is too high latency)

   • Lack of review bandwidth (both high review latency and low number of (active?) reviewers)

   • Debugging rustc is hard/doesn’t work, e.g. under rust-gdb

   • rustc's change-to-test cycle is too long

     • impedes contributing small patches

   • PR queue issues:

     • slow (low throughput)
     • “cannot” do full run of tests on all platforms

https://hackmd.io/gv41a48mRb-KV4SoJ0nXCA?view

About this issue

This issue corresponds to a meeting proposal for the compiler team steering meeting. It corresponds to a possible topic of discussion. You can read more about the steering meeting procedure here.

Comment policy

These issues are meant to be used as an "announcements channel" regarding the proposal, and not as a place to discuss the technical details. Feel free to subscribe to updates. We'll post comments when reviewing the proposal in meetings or making a scheduling decision. In the meantime, if you have questions or ideas, ping the proposers on Zulip (or elsewhere).

[pnkfelix]

In today's planning meeting, we decided to schedule this meeting for June 19th.

Calendar event

Zulip thread for discussing proposal

[pnkfelix]

At this point the public zulip archive will serve as the record for this discussion: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/238009-t-compiler.2Fmeetings/topic/.5Bdesign.20meeting.5D.20survey.20results.20part.202.20compiler-team.23302/near/201393165