Sylvestre's blog

Hello Planet Mozilla

I started as a new employee a few weeks ago. I am working as Release Manager for the next releases of Firefox (both on desktop + android).
As a start, Lukas and I will be working on Firefox 29 (no pressure at all to start with Australis + Firefox account).
I grew up with the first versions of Netscape, followed the Phoenix/Firebird adventures and I have been a supporter of Firefox since then.
I am glad to join such an important project, especially in the perspective of the recent privacy scandals. I think that Mozilla is in the best position to communicate to the public, to denounce certain activities and provides technologies to bypass them.

Besides that, let me introduce myself. I have been in free software for almost a decade.
My previous work as working on Scilab (from Inria to Scilab Enterprises) where I stayed for almost 8 years. Over the years, I worked on various development (C, C++, Java, Python, Scilab, etc), user experience, roadmap definition, release management, R and D / customer project management, management, board member, etc. During this period, I learnt tons of things from coding, release and product management, QA, etc.

In parallel, I worked part time at IRILL, a free software research center (hosted by Inria). I was involved as community management ie organizing event like GNU Hacker meeting, FOSDEM, Euro LLVM, etc and recording them. I had the chance to meet plenty of people from the FLOSS world (including folks from Mozilla who suggested me to join the adventure).

I am also involved in two communities: Debian and LLVM.

The first one is Debian. I started to contribute in Debian to get Scilab properly packaged. 7 years after, I am now maintaining important packages like LLVM, Clang, libedit, emscripten (!) or BLAS/LAPACK, treasurer of the French representative association and organizing the French mini Debian Conference (Debconf) / Meetup.

For the last couple of years, I contributed to LLVM, Clang and LLDB. I participated to the release 3.3 and 3.4. My technical contributions were mainly driven by the packaging, the nightly Debian/Ubuntu packages and also by the rebuild of the Debian archive using Clang (instead of gcc).

And when I am not behind my laptop, I am teaching scuba diving with my girlfriend or hiking, mountaineering, ski touring, climbing, etc.

Yeh, I am a bit hyperactive.

Being a bit hyperactive, I have been involved in the organization of two events. I am the main organizer with Alexandre Delanoë of the Mini Debconf 2014 in Paris, January 18 & 19th.

The (great) planning is available here:
https://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
Saturday morning presentations will be general public, the beginning of Saturday afternoon will be used by the Debian France association to vote the new status (1901 law and Debian Trusted Organization).
Sunday will be more focused on Debian itself.
During the week end, I will be talking about the Debile project, the finance of Debian France and be part of the round table on compiler selection for Debian.
The (mandatory) registration should be done on the Wiki or meetup.com

In parallel, with Tobias Grosser, we organized the LLVM devroom track at FOSDEM (Bruxelles), February 2nd (Sunday).
The schedule is a mix between core developers, third party software using LLVM / Clang and academic users.
https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/llvm/
I will be talking on how to become a LLVM contributor.

Both events should be recorded.

During the month of December, we have been working with folks from En Vente Libre to create a shop with Debian products:

http://www.enventelibre.org/debian

We have now a shop with plenty of Debian products. The design has been done by Ahmet DEMIR. Most of them are already known by the community (they were sold during FOSDEM or various Debconf) like the Buff, Swiss Army knife or the classical polos.

But, t-shirts based on Wheezy theme are brand new:

They are available in three colors:
* Red
* Blue
* Grey

For now, the website is only French, an English version might come in the future.

We just released LLVM & Clang 3.4 (already available in Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty). The clang new release introduces some more warning and error detections. The point of the blog post is not to detail the changes (LLVM / Clang) but more to take a step back on the LLVM and Clang toolchains, usages and dissemination.

For the last couple years, I have been presenting our work on the Debian side to make Clang part of the Debian infrastructure. I add the chance to speak at many events (Debconf 12 & 13, FOSDEM 2013, Linux Plumbers 2013, Distro recipes, etc). I even had Linus Torvalds attending to one of these talks (and proposing new approach). I had many feedback from the Debian/Ubuntu communities but also from other communities.
More and more projects are using Clang as part of their workflows, in term of development, production and QA. For example, some of them are running continuous integration using clang instead of gcc, others are running scan-build (Wireshark or LLVM itself) or Address Sanitizer (asan) (Firefox for example), etc.
More and more actors are moving from gcc to clang for their developments (Sony with their PS4, Chrome under Mac OS X, Apple, the Linux Kernel with the LLVMLinux project, FreeBSD, etc).
I stopped counting the number of times when people answered me "Yeh, I am now using Clang" when I said I am involved upstream.

In parallel, more and more projects are using LLVM as a backend or computing engine and, in the meantime, getting more and more attraction (not because they are based on LLVM but just because they are great projects). For example, Mesa (llvmpipe), Julia, Rust, Emscripten or Native Client (NaCL) are excellent examples of this. The two last are excellent proofs that LLVM based technologies have an impact which goes further than geek-tools and will be used on a daily basis by millions of users.

I also saw an interesting and growing number of new projects using libclang and libTooling. My feeling is that the lack of plugin capabilities in gcc for a long time and, now, its current complexity limited the innovation in term of compilation capabilities, analysis and fun tools. The features and the quality of this library are enabling new developments and I am sure we will see more and more excellent tools based on this library during 2014.
For example, the LLVM toolchain ships Clang modernize and clang format and some cool projects like include-what-you-use, DXR, OCLint or creduce are emerging.

Thanks to this great competition, gcc is also improving (ASAN, JIT, better warnings, etc), remaining still relevant as before. No doubt that 2014 will be a great year for compilers.

iwyu (Include What You Use) has just been accepted in Debian.

This tool, based on LLVM/Clang, checks the headers of a C/C++ file. It will detect which include directives are useless, what could be improve and add comments to explain why #include are there.

Let's take this C file:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <malloc.h>
#include <limits.h>

int foo(void) {
fprintf(stderr, "an error\n");
return INT_MAX;
}


$ iwyu foo.c

will return:

foo.c should remove these lines:
- #include <malloc.h> // lines 2-2

The full include-list for foo.c:
#include <limits.h> // for INT_MAX
#include <stdio.h> // for fprintf, stderr
---


Package on Debian