GSoC21 W7: LFortran Workflow Basics

Revisiting minidftatom and a birds eye view of lfortran

Background

Serialized update for the 2021 Google Summer of Code under the fortran-lang organization, mentored by Ondrej Certik.

Logistics

• Met with Ondrej on Tuesday
  • Went over the debugging workflow
  • Discussed the design of the SymbolTableVisitor and BodyVisitor
  • Fixed a symbol scoping bug and discussed implementing value for kind
• Kept in touch asynchrously over Zulip and MRs

Overview

This week focused on implementing features and cleaning up parts of the project.

New Merge Requests

Cleanup Integer Binary Operations (1045)

There was an extraneous check for something the LFORTRAN_ASSERT would catch

Values for Real Binary Operations (1080)

An implementation, which is similar conceptually and in implementation to the Integer Value MR

Symbol Table Scope Fix for Function Calls (1087)

A bug which haunted me for a few weeks turned out to have a similar fix in the BodyVisitor

Intrinsic Issue Template (1088)

I am rather fond of a particular style of opening missing intrinsic issues, and this codifies it for future use

Draft: ci: Use Ninja everywhere (1085)

A draft MR to return to after updating the CI sometime

Freshly Assigned Issues

Suggestion to refactor ast_to_asr (467)

In particular this has to do with redundancies (of sort) in the SymbolTable and Body visitors

Implement the sqrt intrinsic (468)

Or at-least, for this issue, recognize it as a valid intrinsic

Implement the where conditional (475)

Should be implemented along the same lines as the other conditionals

Semantic error: Variable not declared (476)

Another fascinating episode of “bug detective”, this one might be more of a red herring

Semantics: Minidftatom Math (477)

Collection of intrinsic math functions to be implemented at the ASR level

Additional Tasks

Perhaps adding some more templates would make things easier (for me and other contributors). I intend to update the CI images to leverage ninja.

Misc Logs

Build Times

ninja is fantastic. The make and cmake based workflow I was using often had me stalling for upto half a minute.

Stacktrace Debugging

Ondrej mentioned in the past that he does not use a debugger, and in our meeting we went over extracting information from the stacktrace produced by lfortran. I have personally found it to be rather verbose, but then he pointed out that I could ignore the generated lines from ast.h. That made things a lot easier.

Scoping Rules

• Intrinsics are exposed to the global scope, which has a nullptr parent
• Inside a sub-module, we need to shift the scope, which was done for the BodyVisitor but not for the SymbolTableVisitor

Conclusions

This week was possibly more productive in terms of code than any before. For that, I mostly have to thank that sudden flash of understanding which comes from working on a code-base for weeks (with a fantastic guide). Next week should see the rest of expr_value be completed, and I intend to try my hand at the LLVM backend to make it use expr_value when possible. Naturally, this will be done in tandem with the minidftatom issues, after-all it is back to basics in the sense that progress resumed on working through the main minidftatom roadmap as well.