RE: Plug-ins on Windows

["Grigori Fursin" <gfursin at gmail dot com>]

>I view the current plug-in mechanism as a prototype.  I think that we
>should be working toward a much more robust mechanism, similar to
>plug-ins for Eclipse, Firefox, MySQL, or other popular software stacks.
>I certainly see no reason that plug-ins cannot work on any system that
>has something roughly equivalent to dlopen (which Windows and OS X
>certainly do).  There's lots of prior art here.
>
>The key change we need to make is that instead of the current
>"unstructured" approach where we essentially expose the entirety of the
>GCC internals, we provide a stable, documented API that exposes a
>portion of the internals.  (It's fine with me if there's an expert mode
>in which you can do anything you want, but it should be easy to stay
>within the stable API if you want to do that.)  I would start with an
>API for "observing" (rather than modifying) the internal representation,
> and add modification later.
>
>With observation alone, you could start to build interesting
>static-checking tools, including, for example, domain-specific tools
>that could check requirements of the Linux kernel.  This would be a
>powerful and exciting feature to have in GCC.

Agree with this vision, but it will take some time I guess ;) ...
Grigori