Re: demengler in libstdc++ is changed

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at wasabisystems dot com>]

Chris Lattner <sabre@nondot.org> writes:

> >> Many C++ runtime implementors have reached the conclusion that the C
> >> runtime is far more efficiently and effectively implemented on top of
> >> C++ (rather than the inverse); however that idea seems to meet
> >> (non-technical) resistance (I have no workable theory of why).
> 
> > Well, one obvious reason is that not all C programmers want to learn
> > C++.
> 
> Presumably if they are working on the C++ demangler, they know C++.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to Gaby's comment.

But I'll note that it is false.  I worked on the C++ demangler long
before I learned C++--in particular, I wrote a completely new version
of it for objdump --debugging.  The demangler is a more or less
straightforward decoding process.  You don't need to know the meaning
of the end result to implement the decoding.

> > But if you can get a smaller executable size when doing a static link,
> > then I think it should be seriously considered.  If you can't, then it
> > should not be considered.
> 
> LLVM has a variety of link-time optimizations for reducing both code and
> data size.  Even trivially simple techniques like interprocedural constant
> propagation can make a huge difference... when statically linking, we can
> specialize all of libstdc++ just for the program.  :)

I'm sure it is clear that gcc can not require LLVM.  For the
foreseeable future, gcc must work with the system linker.

Ian