Re: Patch: RFC: verifier genericization

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

Ranjit> 1.  Convert the libgcj verifier to be in pure C - which can
Ranjit>     then have a C++ wrapper (throwing exceptions, etc.) in
Ranjit>     libgcj. (Disclaimer: I haven't yet studied how much of an
Ranjit>     effort this really might be.)

I think this is a lot of work.

The biggest problem is that exceptions help simplify the
implementation.  Using exceptions lets us fail at any point, we let
destructors handle cleanup and we don't have any special error return
codes anywhere.

Second, I suspect that rewriting in C will just leave us in the same
situation, at least vis a vis the ugliness of it all.  We'll have
basically the identical plugin API that was shown in the patch, won't
we?  And the libgcj verify.h will keep all the ugly hacks.

One benefit would be that it would be somewhat simpler to put the
verifier in gcc.  But that presumes that the configury work is harder
than rewriting the verifier in C.  I'm not certain this is the case.

Tom