Re: Criteria for GCC 4.0

[Steven Bosscher <stevenb at suse dot de>]

On Jun 01, 2004 02:20 PM, Richard Kenner <kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:

>     Excuse me, but I don't think this is even desirable.  We have the
>     special-purpose drivers for that and I would encourage people to use
>     them instead.  In fact, I would much rather see that the 'gcc' driver
>     would be _only_ the C compiler.  
> 
> Then how do you propose to do multi-language support?  There are a
> significant amount of large aviation projects that are doing mixed
> Ada/C++ for example.  The fact that each of these languages has a
> different preferred driver program makes this a harder problem than it
> should be.  There would be similar problems with Java/C++.

How do _you_ propose to teach the driver that in such multilanguage
projects, say Ada/C++, it must link both the language's runtime libraries?
Are you  suggesting that my some machical means it should derive that
from the object files, or just via user flags?  You could do the latter just
as well by using gnat and add -lstdc++ to the linker options.

So I don't see how the driver knowing about libraries would make things
easier to do multi-language linking support.

For compiling the source files you're probably right that it's easier if gcc
can derive the proper compiler from the file extension.  I have no alternative
to offer for that, unfortunately.


> Multi-language projects are likely to get increasingly common over
> time and the best way to support them is to remove the special-purpose
> drivers and have "gcc" handle all languages directly.

And teaching the gcc driver about all the language-specific options to get
the semantics right, such as -fnon-call-exceptions for Java?  Please, no.

Gr.
Steven