Re: Converting the gcc backend to a library?

[Geoff Keating <geoffk at envy dot cygnus dot com>]

kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu (Richard Kenner) writes:

>     (1) Making the back-end be a library, with a published API.
> 
>     I think Jeff is saying (and I agree) (2) is definitely ruled out; (1)
>     is not *necessarily* ruled out.  (We [the Gcc steering committee and
>     the FSF] would have to consider the pros and cons carefully - and
>     possibly fine-tune the Gcc license, if required.)
> 
> I'm not sure what distinction from the present situation you are making here.
> Certainly, we view the front end interface of the compiler as an API and
> I think everybody agrees that the more we document ("publish", as you say)
> the interface the better.
> 
> So it would seem the only issue is whether the bulk of GCC could be linked as
> a shared library.  But that seems marginal on both sides: most machines are
> single-user nowadays and memory is cheap, so the benefit of having it as
> a shared library is trivial (the number of times the use count of such an
> image would be greater than one is negligable) and the "risk" of doing such
> from a GPL point of view is also trivial because it doesn't affect the legal
> standing of the software in any way.

The main benefit of such a change would be to reduce disk space
consumption.  On this machine, the four 2.95.2 GCC compilers average
2.5MB each, for a total of 10MB.  I expect you could reduce that to
about 4MB using a shared library for the common back-end.

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>