On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 01:27:29AM +0200, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> > In the short term, a partial conversion to C++ gains us nothing. Even
> > ignoring the bugs inevitably caused by any such project, we'll end up
> > with a strange mish-mash of styles for a very long time, which instead
> > of helping anyone can only lead to confusion. I don't see anyone
> > committing to invest the time in converting even an entire subsystem let
> > alone the whole compiler. Maybe a subsystem conversion would be a good
> > thing to try on a branch and then present the results to the community
> > for evaluation. This would be better than lowering the barrier now for
> > all sorts of random but uncoordinated conversion efforts.
>
> IMO the killer conversion would be vec.[ch], which is a very clever piece of
> code but is almost impossible to use without copy-and-pasting existing cases.
> I think that a proper C++ implementation would be a very convincing argument.
But IMHO not sufficient for a switch. The GCC C++ proponents should do more
on a branch to convince. Yes, the syntactic suger for vec.h isn't very
nice, but the actual implementation is very clever and heavily tuned for
GCC's needs; if we convert to C++ just because of vec.[ch], we open
ourselves to what is being discussed in this thread, people who would like
to turn GCC codebase into yet another LLVM, which not everybody finds
actually very readable and maintainable code, would start doing so.
Jakub
