Re: [RFC] GCC 8 Project proposal: Extensions supporting C Metaprogramming, pseudo-templates

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen <linux at carewolf dot com>]

On Tuesday 09 May 2017, Daniel Santos wrote:
> The primary aim is to facilitate high-performance generic C
> libraries for software where C++ is not suitable, but the cost of
> run-time abstraction is unacceptable. A good example is the Linux
> kernel, where the source tree is littered with more than 100 hand-coded
> or boiler-plate (copy, paste and edit) search cores required to use the
> red-black tree library.
That is not a good excuse, they can just use a defined subset of C++. The cost 
of C++ abstractions is zero if you don't use them. 

> 
> To further the usefulness of such techniques, I propose the addition of
> a c-family attribute to declare a parameter, variable (and possibly
> other declarations) as "constprop" or some similar word. The purpose of
> the attribute is to:
> 
> 1.) Emit a warning or error when the value is not optimized away, and
> 2.) Direct various optimization passes to prefer (or force) either
> cloning or inlining of a function with such a parameter.
> 
This I can get more behind, I have wanted a constexpr attribute for C for some 
time. If not for anything else to be able to use it in shared/system headers 
that can be used by both C and C++ and in C++ would be useful in constexpr 
expressions. If you can find a use for it in pure C as well, so much the 
better.

`Allan