On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Basile Starynkevitch <bas...@starynkevitch.net> wrote: > On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:30:36 -0700 > Xinliang David Li <davi...@google.com> wrote: > [..] >> >> yes -- GCC is not considered old and not 'cool' -- so it is hard to >> advertise. One criteria to see GCC's future popularity is how widely >> it is adopted by academia .. > > > Do you mean used by academia (including teaching programming with students > using GCC), or > do you mean that academia is teaching the internals of GCC, and e.g. have > lots of e.g. > PhD students & professors doing their research using and *improving* GCC.
I mean to use GCC infrastructure to do research such as program analysis and develop very advanced optimization techniques. > > My feeling is that the plugin ability of GCC should help academia to work > more on (that > is, "inside") GCC, to only to use GCC. Plugins can be useful for function level work. For IPA, plugins probably won't be useful. For instance, if someone wants to develop very advanced CS/FS sensitive alias analysis in GCC and demonstrate performance, the aliaser should provide good update APIs to allow the new analysis results to be usable by backend components (transparently) without worrying about how the data can be used. > > (and I am not very very optimistic, in particular because the internal APIs > of GCC are > not very well documented, not very well agreed upon...). > And old plugins can get out of sync with core IRs easily due to lack of good data isolation/hiding. If gcc has a well defined streaming format and standard ir reader/writer, it will make tool developers very happy. David > 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 mine, sont seulement les miennes} ***
