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Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?
>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> writes:
Alexandre> And then, once the underlying problem is addressed and we
Alexandre> have an API that is usable by regular users, maybe we will
Alexandre> find out that we don't need plugins, after all.
Plugins are about deployment, not development.
Plugins make it possible to redistribute useful things which are not
in GCC. They don't -- and as you rightly point out, can't -- make it
simpler to actually develop these things.
The canonical example, which has been covered many times, is a pass
that does extra checking for a large program (e.g., Mozilla).
LD_PRELOAD would work just as well as having gcc directly support
plugins, provided that certain internal things are never made
file-local. Someone could write a helper library to make it
relatively simple to hook in. But... I looked at this recently, and
since gcc is not linked with -rdynamic, it is a non-starter.
Tom