Re: Putting C++ code into gcc front end

[Richard Earnshaw <rearnsha at arm dot com>]

> > Just at this point it isn't reasonable to assume that there 
> > are conforming (even sufficiently conforming) C++ compilers widely 
> > available on the wide range of hosts that GCC currently supports.
> 
> There is gcc 3.2.2.

But that doesn't support hosts that might come along in the future (or are 
you proposing to maintain it in perpetuity?)

> 
> > Anyway defining a suitable subset of C++ that we could expect is 
> > 1) hard -- we don't know enough about all the c++ compilers out there.
> > 2) impossible to enforce rigorously without modifying the compiler to 
> > allow us to detect extensions from the subset.
> 
> Maybe.  Maybe you only really need to care about being able to compile
> with gcc from 2 or 3 major versions past, as gnat seems to do.
> 
> Is it reasonable in 2003 to have a quite complex compiler written in
> K&R C?  Not even ISO C?

The last time this came up (probably less than 6 months ago), the answer 
was "yes".  We've been round this discussion before.  Let's not rehash all 
the same old arguments again.

personally, I'd be happy to see people using K+R only compilers to start 
the bootstrap having to do a 4th stage (so that only the C compiler has to 
be K+R).  It might even mean that the stage0 compiler only contains enough 
code to do non-optimizing compilations.

But that's my opinion and it may well not be shared by other maintainers.  

R.