Re: RFC/RFHelp: c-decl.c rewrite - almost but not quite

[Andrew Pinski <pinskia at physics dot uc dot edu>]

On Mar 16, 2004, at 12:54, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> Here finally is the big c-decl.c rewrite.  I'm pleased to report it
> solves the infamous dwarf2out ICE and several other bugs (see the
> changelog for details).  However, I need some help finishing it.
>
> Most significantly, the Objective-C and possibly Java front ends
> appear to be broken by this patch, such that neither runtime library
> can be built.  For Objective-C the symptoms are a bunch of warnings
> about unexpected types for 'id' followed by an ICE in list_length
> owing to a list of global decls that has somehow become circular.
> (I added circular list detection to list_length under ENABLE_CHECKING;
> without that it would be an infinite loop instead of an ICE.)


Some investigating work on my part, some of the Objective-C failures is
due to the front-end putting a variable in the global scope only as
there is no file scope at the point which it inserts it.
The function which causes this is 
generate_forward_declaration_to_string_table.
But the code to use the decl has been dead for a long time and maybe 
should be
removed too.
The code that used it was removed 
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2001-05/msg01940.html>
but it was "#if 0" before that and I cannot find the place where it was 
"#if 0" out.

I will run the who Objective-C testsuite on this change.

Thanks,
Andrew Pinski