&quot;But I know some things about what words mean, and publishing a paper describing an open source project in March and not having any code available for download in April is just kind of weird, no?
&quot;<p>This is a lot of assumptions.
For starters, it&#x27;s all pretty much part of llvm 3.9 already.<p>&quot;It&#x27;s good to talk about working out the precise mechanics of upstreaming code. But in an open source project, you&#x27;d expect to publish your fork so that other people can play an informed part in that conversation.
&quot;<p>Actually, no, you wouldn&#x27;t, at least not in these communities.  In fact, in most of the projects i&#x27;ve been in, that&#x27;s the last thing i&#x27;d want or the community would want, because it encourages people to play with these weird hybrid versions, when that&#x27;s not what anyone really wants. Instead, we&#x27;d want people to come to us with design ideas, and use cases, not a fait accompli already written that they expect us to do something with.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what projects you are part of that work the opposite way, where it&#x27;s &quot;fork everything and whatever happens happens&quot;, but it&#x27;s not the majority of projects i&#x27;ve belonged to nor have i personally found it to be a very valuable mechanism.  It makes people attached to their current implementations.  When it comes to things like this, a lot of them are written the way they are not because it&#x27;s a good design, but because they needed to get stuff done.  Thus, discussing the use case, and design, and providing example code if people want it to play with, great.  Dumping forks on the world, not a particularly useful thing in most cases except for boosting egos, IMHO (there are times it is useful,for sure, but those are mostly rare cases IMHO).<p>Look at the history of GCC and LLVM forks.  Of those who published forks and started discussion about merging those forks as-is, the number of successful merges is near zero.<p>Of those who said &#x27;hey, we did some cool stuff, here&#x27;s our use cases and our initial thoughts on design. We have stuff that follows this design we can show but are otherwise happy to figure out the right design and build that&quot;, the number of successful merges is near 100%.<p>So that&#x27;s what was done.