Election for Daryl Maier as Project Lead on Eclipse OMR

I am nominating Daryl Maier [1] as a lead for the Eclipse OMR project. Daryl was one of the original OMR committers when the Eclipse OMR project was created and has been one of the most active members of our community in supporting and promoting OMR. He has been the primary guiding hand behind the OMR compiler component’s evolution since its contribution in September 2016. He is one of the most active committers in the project (#2 since March 2016 [2] ) but, beyond the numbers, he has delivered many complex code refactoring and architectural improvements to the OMR project (often in conjunction with the OpenJ9 project) and continues to drive the compiler component towards a more language agnostic design point. He provides comprehensive, thoughtful, professional and timely reviews for a wide variety of pull requests. Not only does he provide feedback himself, but he seeks out the best people to provide additional feedback on reviews to ensure the project high quality bar continues to be met.

But Daryl's influence is much broader than one component. He has initiated, organized and led design discussions that cross several of the major components of OMR including the port library, the garbage collector, parts of the VM componentry, as well as many deeply technical discussions on the compiler component. He started the biweekly OMR compiler architecture meeting which grew into the OMR architecture meeting, where the project now regularly and openly discusses designs for all OMR components [3]. Daryl records these meetings and makes them available on Youtube (e.g. [4] ) for replay and for broader, open access.

Throughout the history of the OMR project, even extending to the days before the project was created [5], Daryl has been and continues to be a staunch supporter and advocate for the OMR project. He has delivered numerous external presentations and written articles that broaden awareness of and promote the OMR project [6][7]. He was one of the primary organizers of the TURBO workshop at SPLASH 2018 [8] and continues to organize the annual “Advances in Open Runtimes Technologies” workshop [9] at CASCON to help academic researchers and students better understand how OMR works and to promote research and projects that use and enhance OMR. He has been an advisor for several OMR based research projects [10][11][12][13][14]. He has mentored and coached young developers (e.g. [15]) in their use of the OMR project, and is frequently a first responder when people ask questions in the Eclipse OMR slack channels. Daryl himself has successfully mentored and nominated several OMR committers [16][17][18] and frequently discusses OMR issues of strategy, governance, and approach with existing project leads.

As Charlie and I have been less actively leading the project in recent years, Daryl has been stepping forward to act as a project lead for the Eclipse OMR project and strongly deserves the formal recognition of the role. I believe Daryl will take the responsibility of the project lead role seriously, will continue to act in the best interests of the OMR project, and will help to propel the project forward. I strongly recommend Daryl Maier be elected as a project lead for Eclipse OMR.

[1] https://github.com/0xdaryl
[2] https://github.com/eclipse/omr/graphs/contributors
[3] https://mtngs.io/eclipse-omr/architecture/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ksZYxp0xsI
[5] https://techconf.me/talks/15413
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLUAB_RO460
[7] https://www.ibm.com/opensource/open/projects/eclipse-omr/
[8] https://2018.splashcon.org/committee/turbo-2018-papers-organizing-commi…
[9] https://www.unb.ca/research/casatlantic/workshops/aortcc-2017.html
[10] http://cs.unb.ca/research-expo/expos/2018/submissions/20180326-13-47-ma…
[11] https://slidetodoc.com/aarch-64-support-for-the-omr-language-runtime/
[12] https://www.cs.unb.ca/research-expo/expos/2019/submissions/20190326-13-…
[13] https://youtu.be/EHHGZLmVgTg?list=TLGGsuAk2tM3-lsxNjA1MjAyMg
[14] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3432601.3432624
[15] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2018/projects/6128487559593…
[16] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.omr/elections/election…
[17] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.omr/elections/election…
[18] https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.omr/elections/election…