On Fri, 16 Mar 2012, David Malcolm wrote: > Proposed outcome [...] > Current architectural issues [...]
Not many people commented on the architectural goals document Diego and I posted at <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-12/msg00103.html>. Many of your ideas seem potentially useful additions to it. I hope Diego will have time soon to push more of the goals and development conventions through community approval and move them to the main website; as we do this, detailed feedback from people interested in these issues is certainly welcome. > * no namespacing: seemingly arbitrary naming convention for symbols. > Would want to add some namespace prefix to the public symbols (vars and > fns), and to the types. Namespaces are one thing that could well be addressed using C++ namespaces (both for GCC itself, and for particular areas within it). > * actually implementing the thing! Yes. Agreement on general goals is certainly useful; it provides an overall context for patch review so a modularity patch doesn't get unhelpful comments to the effect that "this whole modularity idea is ill-conceived". But what's really needed is the investment of many person-years in improvements directed towards well-defined goals. > It seems that GCC has provided an API for registering plugins, but no > API for the plugins to then actually use... Perhaps the C++ move would As regards the limited number of places where plugins get called, the idea (I think) is that as and when a plugin author wants plugins to be involved at a particular point in GCC, they should contribute appropriate patches (rather than GCC developers speculatively guessing what plugins might want). -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
