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Re: Dumping RTL???
In article <3DEE8C16.2050107@solidas.com> you write:
>Andrew Haley wrote:
>
>> It's deliberate because we don't want someone to be able to use the
>> front end of gcc with an unfree back end.
>
>Hmm... gcc is open source... A company like this could ""simply"" alter
>gcc to produce complete RTL output and then use their unfree backend
>anyways? Given that they release the gcc-patch-source, am I right? Or is
>this sceanrio merely academic?
No, this scenario is not merely academic.
In fact, anyone who wishes to patch gcc to dump intermediate representations
or use dumps of intermediate representations may do so.
I won't beat a dead horse and launch again into a discussion of the many
reasons why having intermediate representations dumps would be a good thing,
from many technical point of views.
Such a patch will emphatically not be supported by the official gcc release,
and I wonder how it would fare over time. Would it get active UNsupport by
the official gcc release (e.g., changing enough details to deliberately break
it), or not ? One wonders... then, this is probably not necessary to
deliberately break an hypothetical patch, seeing the speed at which development
breaks existing extensions, or how hard it is to bring old existing front-ends
(modula3, mercury, pascal...) in line with recent gcc.
I do think that the current non-existence of such a patch mainly comes from
a lack of resources in the camp of those that would like to have intermediate
representations as full-fledged objects.