Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

Today I announce the cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler and transition the work into private mode for an indefinite period of time. First and foremost, I myself am saddened by this change, however consider it necessary for sustainability of the project. From now on and for an indefinite period of time, no new major developments of the Kefir compiler project will be distributed publicly. The work on the project will continue privately. The new development model covers all new substantial changes to the project, with an exception made for bug fixes and trivial minor improvements, as well as anything else I might deem specifically necessary to publish. The currently published body of work will remain available. Therefore, this change should not discourage anybody from reporting bugs to the existing publicly available code base. Any reported issues will be addressed publicly to the extent possible. There is a certain amount of code in the currently published development branch. These changes are not trivial, but in my view these do not warrant a separate release. In the coming days, I plan to stabilize this changeset and keep it as unreleased snail-pace master branch. Any potential bug fixes will be published there. That I keep all new code to myself, for my own enjoyment, entertainment and amusement. I do not intend to sell anything, distribute binaries, etc. If anybody is particularly substantively interested, I might share in very limited fashion, but this is not my intention. Summing up the lengthy passages below, I would like to preserve the fun spirit of the project for myself, while keeping it sustainable and healthy in the grand scheme of things. I also do not want my future work to be exploited for naught in commercial purposes. Making it private solves both issues. Apparent downside of this decision seems very limited, given tepid public interest and lack of options to legitimize it. From the very beginning, I have worked on the project purely out of interest for compiling, and the C programming language provided a rich environment in this respect. Any other motivations were secondary at best, and were retrofitted post-hoc. Consequently, publication of the source code has always been just a side effect of having it. I simply had no better thing to do with it in the first place. I have worked on the project in my spare time and on my own budget. However, by this point, the compiler has outgrown my capacity to sustain that development reasonably across all important dimensions: each change needs to take into account correctness across the whole test suite, integration with other features, optimization pipeline and performance considerations, compiler efficiency, other concerns (e.g. debug information management). A substantial chunk of development time goes into planning the changes and debugging fallout, significantly slowing down interesting experiments. Maintaining a reasonable pace of development would require me to either drop the quality bar and give up on some of the aforementioned considerations, or to invest even more time and development resources. I am not willing to do the former, and I am not able to do the latter healthily while meeting my primary obligations elsewhere. Plainly stating, I am not able to preserve current status quo while keeping this fun for myself. Moving the project into private mode lets me mentally reframe it as a purely fun endeavour without any further serious considerations. Raison d'etre for this project's existence has always been deeply subjective and irrational, in the first place. Nevertheless, I was also doing some accounting for this sink of time, especially, lately when scope and development resource mismatch became more acute. Frankly, even for a project that has never had ambitions for tangible success, the "return on investment" has been abysmal. At this point, I concluded that I need to take this into consideration seriously. In particular, by "ROI" I mean a much wider range of things, including (and actually, primarily focusing on) non-monetary aspects. Seeing real feedback, interactions, positive engagement is always encouraging and motivating. I am deeply thankful to everybody who took the time to explore the project, use it, report bugs, package it, or engage with it in any other way. However, the current level of activity I am observing in this regard, rationally, does not allow me to move my work from a fun hobby into some kind of altruistic pro bono community service. This current state of affairs is perfectly reasonable and expected, I do not delude myself about importance or impact of this work, but this is also important in my "ROI" calculus. In the last few months, I have attempted to make some arrangements that would legitimize this work, and enable me to work on the compiler in a beneficial manner (again, beneficial in broader, not necessarily financial sense). Unfortunately, my attempts were futile and did not br

Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

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