Re: [stree] Committed: initial stree infrastructure, and stree versionof enumerators

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Matt Austern wrote:

> First installment of the stree work.  We started with enumerators 
> because they're simple, and also because in some environments (e.g. 
> files that include Apple's Carbon.h header) there are an awful lot of 
> them.  The goal of this work is to avoid having the compiler allocate 
> memory for unused declarations, and, in any real program, the vast 
> majority of Carbon.h enumerators are never used.

To avoid some of the communication issues that we've had with other 
improvements, I want to make clear that I think that y'all should post 
an informal design document with goals, implementation strategy, 
justification of that strategy, etc. before merging.  I'd like to see a 
write-up, not just a patch.  In particular, I bet I will things to say 
(positive or negative!) about this approach, but I'm not going to try to 
examine your preliminary patch to make a determination about that.

My initial instinct is that this is not the most high-value target, and 
that the resulting additional messiness in the type system is going to 
outweigh other wins.  There are a lot of algorithmic mistakes in the 
compiler, and I'd rather we fix them, instead of complicating the 
infrastructure further to compensate for our other stupidity. :-)  But, 
that's all somewhat in the nature of anecdotally-reinforced hypothesis, 
not science.

Thanks for working on these issues!

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
(916) 791-8304
mark@codesourcery.com