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On 11/06/13 04:31, Richard Biener wrote:
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Bernd Schmidt <bernds@codesourcery.com> wrote:On 11/06/2013 10:31 AM, Richard Biener wrote:We decided to move to C++. As part of a later discussion we decided to go with a single general dynamic-casting style, mimicing the "real" C++ variant which is dynamic_cast < ... >. Which resulted in is-a.h. So yes, we've decided to go C++ so we have to live with certain uglinesses of that decisions (and maybe over time those uglinesses will fade away and we get used to it and like it). Thus, there isn't another option besides using the is-a.h machinery and enabling and using RTTI. Sticking to C for gimple doesn't seem to be consistent with the decision to move to C++. Oh, I'm not saying I'm a big fan of as_a / is_a or C++ in general as it plays out right now. But well, we've had the discussion and had a decision.Maybe we need to revisit it? As one of those who were not in favour of the C++ move, can I ask you guys to step back for a moment and think about - what do all of these changes buy us, exactly? Imagine the state at the end, where everything is converted and supposedly the temporary ugliness is gone, what have we gained over the code as it is now?as_a gains us less runtime checking and more static type checking which is good.
Absolutely.
That's a reasonable bet given what's already been said on this list WRT gimple.That I agree to. Instead of fixing the less than optimal separation / boundary between frontends and the middle-end, or fixing several other long-standing issues with GCC we spend a lot of time refactoring things to be C++. But that was kind of part of the decision (though I remember that we mainly wanted to convert containters and isolated stuff, not gimple or trees (I bet that'll be next)).
True. But that's probabl more of an artifact of the engineers involved. David (who's by far the most gung-ho on the C++ front) is fairly new to GCC and isn't really in a position right now to drive much user visible stuff. So he's doing what he can right now.Of course I don't see contributors of "changes that improve gcc for its users" now wasting their time with converting code to C++. That conversion may slow down those people, but only so much. It'll get more interesting with branch maintainance ...
jeff
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