Re: [Gretl-devel] Interest In Contributing

On Mon, 1 Apr 2013, Thomas Zinckgraf wrote: Thank you for your interest! As a professional developer, I don't think you'll have problems in navigating the C sources: although we're now over 400,000 lines of code, Allin has always insisted on a very high standard of code readability; plus, we tend not to use obfuscated C constructs, so if you have a C++ background, you'll probably be mildly annoyed by the lack of automatic memory management and the absence of objects (but you knew that. ;) ), but that should be all. As for a rough map of the source, you may find the following link of some help: http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-devel/2013-January/004269.html As for: a good way to start, I'd be tempted to say that it all depends on what your area of expertise is besides coding per se. If you have experience with graphical GUIs and the GTK framework, I suspect you'll find the source to the GUI client (contained in the gui2/ subdirectory) lots of fun to work with. If, instead, you're more a CS guy and you're into compiler/interpreters design, then you'll want to look at the 'hardcore' stuff in lib/src/: interact.c, monte_carlo.c (where the loop apparatus lives), and all the gen*[ch] files (Backus-Naur magic). Finally, if you're strong at numerical techniques and number-crunching, your best bet is probably to start from gretl_matrix.[ch] and matrix_extra.[ch], which are relatively easy to follow and may provide a good springboard to the rest of the code. Alternatively, lib/src/pvalues.c contains a vast assortment of functions relating to random numbers (generations, densities, distributions etc) which range from trivial two-liners all the way to heavyweights such as the Geweke-Hajivassiliou-Keane simulation-based multivariate normal algorithm. There are certainly other useful things you may want to do that I can't think of right now. Please, feel free to ask for help any time you want. And thank you again! ------------------------------------------------------- Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES) Università Politecnica delle Marche (formerly known as Università di Ancona) r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti -------------------------------------------------------