I hate to be negative, but that code base is a complete mess. I looked into helping out on the project a few months ago, but stopped almost immediately when I saw the code. I'm a little sad that a release is being announced and the code is still a mess.
For example, in the src/core directory there are about a million files, of types .txt, .cc, .cxml, .xml, .old, .py, .sh, .prototype, .csc, .pdb, .moe, .grep, *.fbp, etc., and many of them have mysterious names like "tf.csc" or "v.txt". And a lot of the files seem to have nothing to do with common lisp or C++, and contain mysterious 1 or 2 line code snippets or shell one liners.
Honestly, it's just a terrible first impression. Are there any plans to clean it up and make it usable by other people?
The code base being a mess is a known problem. There's an issue open for the next release to get rid of all those useless files ([1]). The code has also recently been passed through clang-format, and in general the quality of the codebase appears to be improving as the number of people contributing to it is slowly increasing.
A file having multiple copyright notices is actually common practice. It indicates that the code is based on older code, the copyright of which of course belongs to the original author, but that it has been significantly modified by the "new" author.
I think it's important to note that up until recently this was basically a one-man project. It's in the early stages still. drmeister has since gotten some serious help organizing the project, which should (and looking at the issue tracker, I think it will) help a lot to keep the project moving forward in the right direction.
The 0.4 release seems to mark a point at which Clasp is usable and major issues with its functionality have been resolved. It's not in any way "finished".
If you want to contribute or are just interested in the project I'd suggest joining #clasp on Freenode (as I did a couple of months ago). The channel is pretty active.
Yes - I have a plan to clean it up. Clasp exposes the clang source to source translation library. Now that it's fast I'm going to automatically refactor the whole thing in one go.
For example, in the src/core directory there are about a million files, of types .txt, .cc, .cxml, .xml, .old, .py, .sh, .prototype, .csc, .pdb, .moe, .grep, *.fbp, etc., and many of them have mysterious names like "tf.csc" or "v.txt". And a lot of the files seem to have nothing to do with common lisp or C++, and contain mysterious 1 or 2 line code snippets or shell one liners.
Honestly, it's just a terrible first impression. Are there any plans to clean it up and make it usable by other people?
Edit: And perhaps more worrying, there are things like this https://github.com/drmeister/clasp/blob/master/src/clbind/cl..., where there's a copyright notice, and then immediately below it an older copyright notice to somebody else.