Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google dot com>]

Richard Kenner wrote:

> No, I mean for *testing* you need to do a bootstrap.  I'm not talking
> about the minimum actually needed to build.

Nope, you don't.  If you are doing static analysis, for instance, you 
don't care nor need to bootstrap GCC.  You just need to load your module 
every time a file is compiled.

If you are doing a pass that you are testing and/or prototyping, you 
don't want to waste time rebuilding the whole compiler.  If/when your 
pass reaches certain maturity, you think it's ready for production, and 
people think it's a good idea to have it in the compiler, then you 
convert it into a static pass and you go through the traditional 
bootstrap process.

Similarly, for visualization plug-ins, you don't want/need to bootstrap 
the compiler.  That's the core idea with plug-ins, they allow more 
flexibility for experimentation.  They are not a means for implementing 
permanent features in the compiler.  We would not guarantee ABI nor API 
stability, there is just no point to doing that.


Diego.