Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at integrable-solutions dot net>]

Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org> writes:

| On Apr 5, 2004, at 11:08 PM, Stephan T. Lavavej wrote:
| 
| > [Ben Elliston]
| >> This should be a side goal of future GCC work: to develop it
| >> in a way that makes it easier for the uninitiated to hack on
| >> it.  This includes removing complicated cruft and generally
| >> trying to keep the code base small and as simple as possible.
| >
| > How about writing gcc in Modern, Standard C++?  You could do away
| > with your
| > crazy garbage-collected C (double ugh).
| >
| > This inflammatory suggestion was brought to you by...
| >
| About half of us want to do this.
| Another 25% want to rewrite it in some other language
| The other 25% think converting it to ISO C went too far.
| They also believe that english language development should have
| stopped with shakespeare, and that kids these days don't do anything
| right.

Very recently, I've taken a poll among the g++ maintainers on the
matter of making the front-end compilable by (but -without- requiring)
a C++ compiler.  I got one positive feedback and one over-my-dead-body.

[ The reason I brought the issue is that some people here have been
  developing an interesting C++ library that makes it  possible to
  represent C++ programs in C++ and they have been using a commercial
  compiler (early versions used GCC-3.0.x, before switching to that
  commercial compiler); as a member of that project, a C++ user and
  maintainer of   GCC, I'm of the opinion that such a library is of
  great value to the GCC/g++ user community. ]

-- Gaby