This is the mail archive of the
gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org
mailing list for the GCC project.
Re: Objective C/C++ Compiler Drivers
On Sat, 4 Sep 2010, Philip Herron wrote:
> Then does it make sense for a compiler driver to be generated from
> some kind of a config, i agree i've always found the compiler drivers
> a frustrating thing, since for the most part all will do pretty
> similar things, most customizations would be add extra linker options
> i guess. I am not sure if that means we would have a build system to
> generate it from a bash script and add extra options to the
> config-lang.in to generate this or something.
I am suggesting something much simpler: incremental refactoring of the
existing code, moving shared utility functions to gcc.c, so that in the
end most drivers can call a shared function and pass a C structure to it.
Not anything requiring generator programs.
For example, you might adapt the Fortran functions such as append_arg to
allocate space dynamically rather than hardcoding limits on the size of
the new array of options based on the old one, move them to gcc.c with
declarations in gcc.h and make all drivers use them. That could be one of
the incremental patches. Subsequent ones might try to identify what is
common about the logic to add language-specific libraries.
There is an idea that we don't really want all these drivers at all - we
want "gcc" to link in the right libraries automatically for whatever
languages were used for the object files it is asked to link - which
certainly requires those libraries to be described by suitable
datastructures gcc.c can use.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com