Graal backends structure improvement proposal

[leonvisscher]

Hi @zhquan and @vchrombie!

As part of the Grimoirelab MSR hackathon our team has been working on making some refactoring and maintenance contributions for the Graal project. Based on our experience of using Graal and exploring the code we identified some refactoring opportunities. Besides that we looked at the existing issues in this repository, and found issue Issue #89 which discusses the current backend structure/approach of Graal.

Yesterday we had a meeting with @valeriocos to discuss our proposal and got some good feedback. Valerio suggested us to contact you to discuss this further. We are very interested in getting your thoughts on this proposal and would like to get in touch.

We have worked out a POC for improving this structure (https://github.com/wmeijer221/grimoirelab-graal/tree/refactor). To give an impression, below are two figures that show the current and proposed structure.

Current structure

Proposed structure

[vchrombie]

Hi @leonvisscher, thanks for your interest in the GrimoireLab.

Your approach looks much simpler which was the goal of issue #89 if I understand correctly. I didn't get time to look more into the code to understand the approach. I will surely look into it this weekend.

Also, I'm interested to hear comments from @sduenas and @jgbarah, and what they think about it?

[leonvisscher]

Thanks for you reaction @vchrombie!

We have opened a pull request where we've implemented this proposal for only the CoLic backend to keep the changes comprehensible. Would you be able to look at the PR this week? We would like to gather and process feedback before the hacakthon submission.