Hi, On Nov 16, 2007 12:16 PM, Alexander Lamaison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Diego Novillo wrote: > > Several projects will survive the initial prototyping stages and become > > techniques we can apply in industrial settings. We want to attract > > that. Plus we want to attract the grad students that did the research > > and graduate with a favourable attitude towards using GCC in their > > future career. > > As a research student who spent 6 months working on an improvement to GCC, I > agree with all of Diego's remarks. Out of the 6 months, 4 were spent > learning the GCC internals and fighting the GCC build process, 1 was spent > writing up leaving 1 month of actual productive research. While not all of > this would be solved by a plugin system (a lot was down to documentation) it > would have significantly increased the amount of time I had to make useful > contributions.
I have started looking into GCC slightly more than a year ago, since then I have successfully finished thesis on interprocedural optimizations which was largely a research project. I am still essentially a newcomer, yet I completely disagree. When I think what a plugin framework would help me with, I cannot think of anything significant. It would have saved me modifying passes.c which was not really an issue. Everything else would be as complicated as it was or even more. So as far as attracting new programmers, researchers and inexperienced students in particular is concerned, I think that effort that implementing plugins would take would be much better spent on keeping documentation up to date, possibly improving it (hey, Alexander, what were your problems, someone might answer them on Wiki for others!) and, in particular, staying as friendly and forgiving community as you are (especially on IRC anyway :-). IMHO 4 months of learning how to work with GCC internals seems to be completely reasonable time for me. Compilers are complex and GCC is no toy. (And plugins won't help with this, will they?) Of course, I understand there might be other and perhaps more important uses of plugins. Martin
