Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[Diego Novillo <dnovillo at google dot com>]

Joe Buck wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 09:20:21AM +0100, Emmanuel Fleury wrote:
> > Is there any progress in the gcc-plugin project ?
>
> Non-technical holdups.  RMS is worried that this will make it too easy
> to integrate proprietary code directly with GCC.

I don't believe this is a strong argument.  My contention is, and has 
always been, that GCC is _already_ trivial to integrate into a 
proprietary compiler.  There is at least one compiler I know that does this.

In fact, much/most of the effort we have been spending in making GCC 
easier to maintain, necessarily translates into a system that is easier 
to integrate into other code bases.

IMO, the benefits we gain in making GCC a more attractive code base, far 
outweigh the fears of someone co-opting it for their own proprietary uses.

We gain nothing by holding infrastructure advances in GCC.  While GCC 
still has the advantage of being widely used, its internal 
infrastructure is still relatively arcane and hard to deal with.  We 
have already kicked it into the mid 90s, but we still have a lot of 
ground to cover.  An antiquated and arcane infrastructure will only help 
turn new developers away.


Diego.