On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 12:33 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote: > Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > > > OK, I will reformulate my question to you and Diego is: is this what we > > want, > > e.g. C++ as THE common implementation language, or just ONE common > > implementation language (the other being C)? > > I believe that we want (a subset of) C++ to be the language used to > implement all of GCC, including front-ends, back-ends, and common code. > Where we currently use C, we wish to instead use C++.
You forgot to mention plugins. In my understanding, any future GCC plugin would necessarily be coded in C++ and be compiled by a C++ compiler. Am I right? The consequence would be that future GCC could be built on a system with any C compiler, but only a C++ one. I would even imagine that later, one could configure GCC to have only a C++ front-end, but no more a C one. That probably would be unusual, since many important applications which want to be compiled by GCC (I am thinking of the Linux kernel) will continue to exist in C. But I would believe that a future GCC with only a C++ frontend and without a C frontend would be possible, and be able to bootstrap (i.e. make stage3), which is not true today. IIRC, today's GCC (i.e. 4.5) cannot even be configured to have a C++ front-end without having a C front-end. Do we want to change that? Cheers. -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faiencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
