Diego Novillo wrote: > Richard Kenner wrote: > > > I don't see that. Why is it that much harder to link in with GCC > than doing > > it as a plugin? > > Limited time and steep learning curves. Typically, researchers are > interested in rapid-prototyping to keep the paper mill going. Plug-ins > offers a simple method for avoiding the latencies of repeated bootstrap > cycles. > > 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 fully understand that this can seems strange to people who know GCC like the back of their hand, but to a newcomer it is a huge task just to write a single useful line of code. I'm sure many give up before ever reaching that point. Alex Lamaison Imperial College London
