Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Taras" == Taras Glek <taras.judge@shaw.ca> writes:

Tom> LD_PRELOAD would work just as well as having gcc directly support
Tom> plugins, provided that certain internal things are never made
Tom> file-local.  Someone could write a helper library to make it
Tom> relatively simple to hook in.  But... I looked at this recently, and
Tom> since gcc is not linked with -rdynamic, it is a non-starter.

Taras> Tom, I don't know much about linkers and LD_PRELOAD. Would making
Taras> LD_PRELOAD work be easier than making an unstable plugin API?

Not really.

The difference would be that with LD_PRELOAD the gcc change would be
very small -- just linking with -rdynamic.  Maybe you could lobby a
Linux distro for this :-)

But even if the gcc change is small, you'd still want to write and
maintain about the same amount of code to let plugins interface with
the pass manager.

Tom