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Comment by dwroberts

13 hours ago

The PRs they link mostly seem like noise? “Remove the d prefix from this number because the C++ standard doesn’t require it”. Yeah great.

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dwroberts

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jstanley  13 hours ago

That's a pretty unfair characterisation of the commit in question: https://github.com/loongson/jdk/pull/125/commits/ee300a6ce73...

By my reading, it's not merely that the standard doesn't require the "d" suffix, it's that the standard doesn't allow the "d" suffix, and the code won't compile on anything but gcc.

  • freedomben  13 hours ago

    Agreed, although things I immediately think of are:

    1. Is "anything but gcc" actually supported by the project? Do they have a goal of supporting other compilers or possibly an explicit decision not to support other compilers?

    2. If they do support other compilers, how did the "d" suffix make it in the first place? That's something I would expect the dev or CI to catch pretty quickly.

    3. Does gcc behave any differently with the "d" suffix not there? (I would think a core dev would know that off the top of their head, so it's possible they looked at it and decided it wasn't worth it. One would hope they'd comment on the PR though if they did that). If it does, this could introduce a really hard-to-track-down bug.

    I'm not defending Oracle here (in fact I hate Oracle and think they are a scourge on humanity) but trying to approach this with an objective look.

    • mort96  4 hours ago

      Is the project clearly documented as being written in GNU C++ rather than standard C++? If not, anything that's accidentally invalid C++ is fair game for bug fixes, is it not?

  • dwroberts  13 hours ago

    If all of these things are about making it build under clang though they need to better explain it or maybe group these changes together though.

    My initial comment was maybe unfair but I can completely sympathise with the maintainers etc. that separately these PRs look like random small edits (e.g. from a linter) with no specific goal

perryprog  13 hours ago

Even if the changes aren't "meaningful" (which it seems like they are), they still have an impact in how it makes the contributor more comfortable with working on the project. No new contributor is going to start with making massive patches without starting out with some smaller things to get a feel for working with the project.

  • Twirrim  12 hours ago

    Agreed, these seem like ideal patches to me for a first contribution. Solves a specific problem, doesn't require a lot of effort on maintainers side to review, and should give them a straightforward path to familiarise themselves with the process.

thethirdone  13 hours ago

The d suffix makes it not compile under clang. The PRs seem like mostly small changes that are clear improvements.