RE: -fdump-translation-unit considered harmful

["Dams, Dennis (Dennis)" <dennis at research dot bell-labs dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gdr@integrable-solutions.net 
> [mailto:gdr@integrable-solutions.net] 
> Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 12:33 PM
> To: Adam Nemet
> Cc: Ian Lance Taylor; Dams, Dennis (Dennis); gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: -fdump-translation-unit considered harmful
> 
> Adam Nemet <anemet@lnxw.com> writes:
> 
> | Ian Lance Taylor <ian@airs.com> writes:
> | > -fdump-translation-unit doesn't do anything in the C frontend.
> | 
> | Is the patch below OK to update documentation accordingly?  Tested 
> | with make info and make dvi.
> 
> OK.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- Gaby
>

Have there been any new thoughts/developments on the issue of elevating the current dump facilities (-fdump-translation-unit, and the -fdump-tree functionality) to a more formal API?

We're working on a tool for static code analysis (aimed at verification issues and program understanding, rather than compile-time optimization). One kind of input that the tool can handle is the .t00.tu format as produced (for C) by an older version of the tree-ssa (in fact, the ast-optimizer) branch. Still, we had to make a few adjustments to make the dump format more useful - e.g.:

* preventing the disposal of trees of function bodies, so that the dump includes all file-level definitions
* preventing the insertion of pointer-offsets
* adding double quotes around strings, and escaping certain characters in them, so as to make parsing easier

It would be great if this behavior could be made part of the current GCC release. But it would be even better if there could be some prior agreement, among those who would be interested, about what a reasonable tree-dump format should look like.
And then there are the legal issues - I don't actually know what the conclusion was of the discussions in this thread last Dec./Jan.
--dennis.