Re: GCC 4.8.0 Status Report (2012-10-29), Stage 1 to end soon

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat dot com>]

On Wed, 2012-10-31 at 11:13 +0100, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Status
> > ======
> >
> > I'd like to close the stage 1 phase of GCC 4.8 development
> > on Monday, November 5th.  If you have still patches for new features you'd
> > like to see in GCC 4.8, please post them for review soon.
> 
> Reminds me of the stable plugin API for introspection.  David, Micha - what's
> the status here?  Adding this is certainly ok during stage3 and I think that
> we should have something in 4.8 to kick of further development here.

(sorry for the belated response, I was on vacation).

I'm currently leaning towards having the API as a separate source tree
that can be compiled against 4.6 through 4.8 onwards (hiding all
necessary compatibility cruft within it [1]), generating a library that
plugins can link against, providing a consistent C API across all of
these GCC versions.  Keeping it out-of-tree allows plugins to be written
that can work with older versions of gcc, and allows the plugin API to
change more rapidly than the rest of gcc (especially important for these
older gcc releases).  Distributions of gcc could build the plugin api at
the same time as gcc, albeit from a separate tarball.

When the API is more mature, we could merge it inside gcc proper, I
guess.

I'll try to post something later today.

Dave
[1] e.g C vs C++ linkage