RE: Progress on GCC plugins ?

["Alexander Lamaison" <awl03 at doc dot ic dot ac dot uk>]

Diego Novillo wrote:
 
> Richard Kenner wrote:
> 
> > I don't see that.  Why is it that much harder to link in with GCC
> than doing
> > it as a plugin?
> 
> Limited time and steep learning curves.  Typically, researchers are
> interested in rapid-prototyping to keep the paper mill going.  Plug-ins
> offers a simple method for avoiding the latencies of repeated bootstrap
> cycles.
> 
> Several projects will survive the initial prototyping stages and become
> techniques we can apply in industrial settings.  We want to attract
> that.  Plus we want to attract the grad students that did the research
> and graduate with a favourable attitude towards using GCC in their
> future career.

As a research student who spent 6 months working on an improvement to GCC, I
agree with all of Diego's remarks.  Out of the 6 months, 4 were spent
learning the GCC internals and fighting the GCC build process, 1 was spent
writing up leaving 1 month of actual productive research.  While not all of
this would be solved by a plugin system (a lot was down to documentation) it
would have significantly increased the amount of time I had to make useful
contributions.

I fully understand that this can seems strange to people who know GCC like
the back of their hand, but to a newcomer it is a huge task just to write a
single useful line of code.  I'm sure many give up before ever reaching that
point.

Alex Lamaison
Imperial College London