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Re: [PATCH 0/6] Conversion of gimple types to C++ inheritance (v3)


On 11/06/13 06:23, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
On Wed, 6 Nov 2013, Jakub Jelinek wrote:

On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 12:31:00PM +0100, Richard Biener wrote:
Maybe we need to revisit it? As one of those who were not in favour of
the C++ move, can I ask you guys to step back for a moment and think
about - what do all of these changes buy us, exactly? Imagine the state
at the end, where everything is converted and supposedly the temporary
ugliness is gone, what have we gained over the code as it is now?

as_a gains us less runtime checking and more static type checking
which is good.

But that really affects --enable-checking=yes builds (and only cases where
things aren't inlined).  If the price for that is uglier and less readable
code, then the price is just too high.

I see static type checking as being about preventing certain sorts of bugs
getting in the compiler at all, rather than about saving time on runtime
checks for --enable-checking=yes.
Amen! When I've described RTL & trees to other folks in the business that work(ed) on other compilers, most gasped in horror. Doubly so when I did this prior to the introduction of the tree/rtl checking systems.



I don't have advice on the gimple case.  But certainly trees and RTL could
both do with more static typing.  There, I'm thinking of different types
of objects (types, expressions, ...) logically being completely separate
static types, not inheriting from a common "tree" base class at all.  But
if inheritance and as_a can be used as intermediate steps to allow an
incremental transition to completely separate static types, where
otherwise the whole source tree would need converting at once, that seems
reasonable to me. (I have no comments about what things should look like
in cases where completely separate static types don't make sense but there
is still some sort of inheritance structure.)
I hadn't really thought of it that way -- specifically that when we're done we don't necessarily need to have decls, types, expressions inheriting from a common tree base class. I must say, I like it as a guiding principle.

Jeff


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