Hi, this is Philip, the author of these reports. Sorry if this is confusing, but these are the reports I make weekly and present to Open Source Security, Embecosm and the GCC Steering committee. As this work is all open-source, I wanted to be as open as possible about developing such an ambitious project.

Another reason is that I wish to write up some document describing how the rust-language layers up, maybe a year from now. It is not very obvious to me what is bare metal rust vs compiler magic/library magic in the rust language. With these reports and my experience down the line, this might be interesting for people to read.

Please keep 'm coming. They provide very interesting reads. You might consider, in the first sentence, to change 'this project' to a link with a more high level document.

That's a good idea! Your comment means alot to me, thank you I put alot of work into my reports and will be trying to present them on my YouTube more regularly https://youtube.com/user/redzor812 I am really inspired by serenity os and Tim Morgan on natalie.

It's a monthly report, it's target audience isn't people who're unaware of the project IMO.

It just got posted to hacker news which is full of people who are unaware of it. It doesn’t take much work to copy paste a paragraph from the readme into the post.

It is not the author's responsibility to change the content of a report because it got linked on a link aggregator website somewhere on the internet.

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest people who feel like the content that's linked here is not too approachable to use the facilities provided to downvote the post to help other people avoid suboptimal content, if they feel it would be called for.

No it's not the author's responsibility, but if a few seconds of work could make the update accessible to far more people (and get more people excited about it), I'm not sure I see an argument against putting that context. Frankly, every article and blog post should be written that way.

Sure, it's not required, but how many people were turned off because they had no idea what the article was about?

Should all monthly reports for this project start with a paragraph introducing the project itself? I don't believe so. I don't think this article was written with the general HN userbase in mind, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't think that it should, but I will say that people do tend to appreciate it. That said, as you said, nothing wrong with not doing it. With Rust, we just made a template for these sorts of posts that include a sentence explaining what Rust is right at the start, so no burden for us.

> Should all monthly reports for this project start with a paragraph introducing the project itself?

Why not? A lot of projects do it. You also don't have to include that introduction in your RSS feeds, for the most avid readers, but it's very useful for newcomers.

Labor is very expensive, I'd rather it be spent working on gcc-rs rather than making reports about working on gcc-rs more elaborate. I do think that it'd be reasonable to expect anyone who's somewhat interested in what this is about to investigate themselves. Having said that, I don't believe that this kind of a post is necessarily well suited for being posted on HN exactly because it's not aimed towards a more general audience but rather it's specifically targeted towards people who're already interested in the project.

I agree with the hidden cost of PR labor for volunteer-run projects. But a summary of the project can be very short and efficient. Copied (shortened) from the README:

> gccrs is a full alternative implementation of the Rust language ontop of GCC with the goal to become fully upstream with the GNU toolchain. Please find the answers to frequently asked questions over on: https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Ques...

Two sentences like these would be more than enough to give a person passing by enough information to know what it's about, if it'd be useful for them, and whether they'd like to keep on reading.