On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 7:34 AM, Bernd Schmidt <ber...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > On 04/11/2012 09:45 AM, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: >> I have been having difficulty following the twists and the turns and >> the goal post moving. >> Are you essentially requiring to see GCC rewritten in C++ before we >> switch to C++? > > Frankly, despite all this discussion, we still don't really know what > the people who insist on a C++ conversion actually want to do. We've > seen trivial suggestions like rewriting vec.[ch], which isn't really > going to make a big difference in the grand scheme of things, but > everything else has remained vague. At the GCC gathering last year we > saw a presentation which made me feel like language features had just > gone in search of possible applications, which doesn't fill me with a > lot of confidence either. > > So yes, I would like some significant part rewritten in the way the C++ > folks would like to see it, so we can actually judge what we will get. > And that's moving my personal goal post from "hell no" somewhere closer > to what the C++ proponents would like. > > The incremental approach (tearing down the barrier of stage1 being > compiled in C first and then getting things in piecewise) may seem like > a path of less resistance, but we can't afford to have a thread like > this for every change, and I wouldn't like to see us decide after 100 > patches that the end result sucks and we have to either live with it or > revert the lot. > > IMO, gimple might be worth trying to convert, since it's the newest code > in gcc and presumably already half-way to what people consider a > "modern" style (lots of annoying little functions that get in the way > while debugging). > > But I suspect that when such a branch has been done, it will still come > down to personal preference as to which variant is best. This is why I > still think the whole thing is deeply misguided, as it's not about > objective technical issues, but merely about language preferences, and > everyone has a different one. You can't match everyone's taste in a big > project, and thus real developers have to adapt to a project, not the > other way round. Discussions like this are a toxic distraction from real > work. > > IMO it would be best if we could find a majority of global reviewers to > speak out and say once and for all "no, this just isn't happening", so > we can drop all this nonsense and get back to improving the compiler for > users. The second best thing would be to have a branch with actual work > done for us to consider.
The reason why I am mystified is that the people who seem to argue that it would be pointless to convert the existing codebase to C++ seem to be the same people who insist on seeing significant part of GCC converted to C++ before we switch to *building* stage1 with a C++ compiler. -- Gaby
