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Re: Great example of why "everything is a tree" sucks
- From: Richard Biener <richard dot guenther at gmail dot com>
- To: Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google dot com>
- Cc: Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>, Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>, GCC <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 11:10:11 +0100
- Subject: Re: Great example of why "everything is a tree" sucks
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <528288B3 dot 8010109 at redhat dot com> <20131112203509 dot GC27813 at tucnak dot zalov dot cz> <CAD_=9DQRZy92RCJEopO=XHMj9+eDHQ0MW1g__ZaFNNrWQW=QNg at mail dot gmail dot com>
On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Diego Novillo <dnovillo@google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> Note that we have tons of code which accept either objects or types,
>> both in the frontends and in the middle-end, so changing TREE_TYPE
>> from tree to something else is definitely non-trivial.
>
> Well, sure it's hard. This is the whole point behind Andrew's
> refactoring project: setting up the groundwork for this kind of
> conversion to be possible.
Well, he doesn't even consider that the exact same "tree rant" applies
to frontend code.
Thus "fixing" trees would be far better as you'd win for both frontend
and middle-end code!
Fix the trees! Don't invent new ones!
Richard.
> The software engineering atrocities that we have committed in the code
> base are going to take a few iterations to fix. But fix them, we
> must.
>
> I am convinced that this is the only way for GCC to avoid untimely
> oblivion; and allow it to evolve in ways that are now hard or
> impossible to implement.
>
>
> Diego.