Merge-back to respective upstreams?

[janmejay]

First of all, thanks a lot for putting this out in the public-domain.

I have a few questions, not sure if this is the best place to ask, but here I go:

A lot more users will directly benefit form this if this is provided as a package through distro-repositories for major OS distributions. So my questions are around how the teams sees this going forward:

• Is the team working with upstream to merge changes back to clang/llvm codebases? If so, what release is being targeted/what timeline?
• If merge-back is not on the cards, what is the long-term plan wrt packaging for various OS distro-flavors? Is the aim to make it available as separate packages on major distros (eg. Debian)?
• If the plan is to have a separate distribution in the long-term, what does this mean for work that happens on Clang/LLVM upstream? Will patches from Clang/LLVM be merged back from time to time? How will the releases be planned?

[dtarditi]

Yes, we would like to push this upstream to LLVM/clang. It is pretty early in the compiler implementation, so we are not ready to do that yet. As we make progress, we plan to have discussions with the clang team about doing that. clang has a written policy about taking language extensions back. The bar is reasonably high - you need to have a substantial user community and a proposal before the standards body for the language. As we make progress with the compiler implementation, we'll be in a good position to have a discussions with the clang folks about possibly taking this back.