Taras Glek wrote:
Would you consider restructuring GTY markers to be more like GCC
attributes?
It could have some advantages, but if I understand what you mean it
would make sense only on platforms where GCC is compiled by itself. I
believe that (perhaps unfortunately) the rule is that GCC should be
compilable by any ISO-C conformant compiler.
I'm writing code to generate code to convert GCC trees to
JavaScript objects for my GCC plugin. Clearly this is similar to what
gengtype does. However, I would like to reuse GTY markers without using
the gengtype parser. Since I already use the GCC asts, it would be handy
if GTYs were just gnu attributes.
I think it was also be beneficial to do GTYs as gcc attributes for
consistency instead of having yet another language extension.
So far I've defined GTY as
#define GTY(x) __attribute__((user (#x)))
Which appears to work for most cases except for numerous cases of
typedef struct Name GTY(()) {
};
These would parse fine as attributes if they were more like
typedef struct GTY(()) Name {
};
Maybe you might patch gengtype to accept such a change, and be able to
parse the above? Then you only have to (trivially) patch all the files
so that typedef struct Name GTY(()) is changed to
typedef struct GTY(()) Name
Would you be willing to accept such a change?
Another possible benefit of raising GTYs to attribute status would be
that other projects could do compile-time reflection similar to what GCC
does in a semi-formal way.
This would be interesting (including for my MELT branch)
A more disruptive technique would be to have all the data defined with
GTY described (perhaps more precisely) elsewhere. I mean to have all the
GGC handled data described -probably in a different syntax- elsewhere,
and having all the struct and GGC routines generated otherwise.
Regards
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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