Gimple dump

["Richard Warburton" <richard dot warburton at gmail dot com>]

As a PhD student, I am interested in writing some experimental
implementation code related to optimisations against Gimple.  I am
hoping to be able to use the tree-dump.c implementation to dump out a
gimple representation into a text file, then parse said output and
recreate the gimple IR.  Using this approach way I only need to run
the general C parsing and gimple lowering once.  Then I can repeatedly
test my implementation, altering it and recompiling very quickly
against essentially just the Gimple IR source code, rather than the
whole of GCC.

I also intend to create an interactive optimisation framework for GCC,
in which optimisations are generated on the fly from the
specifications, which is another motivating factor for being able to
run this type of quick recompile.  Even though I can understand that
this wouldn't be very important for many GCC developers.

Given these circumstances, I have three questions:

1. how much information is lost from the Gimple IR in the dumping process?
2. Is there any current implementation that takes the dumped form of
gimple, and can recreate the IR.
3. Would the GCC project find it useful to have such source code
committed back upstream to you guys, once it has been finished, in
order to make it faster to test out new optimisations written against
gimple?

  Richard Warburton