[L2Ork-dev] New developer interested in doing a GSOC18 project

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 12:15 PM, Giulio Moro <g.moro at qmul.ac.uk> wrote:
> Just mentioning that, in my opinion, backwards compatibility should be granted.

Prior art suggests that this is doable/maintainable for the core.

For external libraries: some are written in ways that are either
backwards-compatible or
way that can be easily made backwards-compatible. Others certainly aren't.

After the core we can start with the most important (popular) external
libraries and then
see where that leaves us for the rest.

> So any non-backwards compatible changes needed in the rest of the codebase should be protected under an `#ifdef`.

That isn't always the case. For example, katja changed out some core
DSP algorithms that relied
on type-punning with more straightforward implementations. Performance
tests showed that a
double-precision compiled binary performed within a reasonable range
of a vanilla binary. IIRC they also
showed that a singled-precision binary with the new algos performed
better than a vanilla binary.

That kind of approach where possible is preferable to
shipping/maintaining two different algos or
code paths.

-Jonathan

> Best,
> Giulio