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Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?


Hi,

On Nov 16, 2007 12:16 PM, Alexander Lamaison <awl03@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:
> Diego Novillo wrote:
> > Several projects will survive the initial prototyping stages and become
> > techniques we can apply in industrial settings.  We want to attract
> > that.  Plus we want to attract the grad students that did the research
> > and graduate with a favourable attitude towards using GCC in their
> > future career.
>
> As a research student who spent 6 months working on an improvement to GCC, I
> agree with all of Diego's remarks.  Out of the 6 months, 4 were spent
> learning the GCC internals and fighting the GCC build process, 1 was spent
> writing up leaving 1 month of actual productive research.  While not all of
> this would be solved by a plugin system (a lot was down to documentation) it
> would have significantly increased the amount of time I had to make useful
> contributions.

I have started  looking into GCC slightly more than  a year ago, since
then   I  have   successfully  finished   thesis   on  interprocedural
optimizations  which  was  largely  a  research project.  I  am  still
essentially a newcomer, yet I completely disagree.

When I  think what  a plugin  framework would help  me with,  I cannot
think  of  anything significant.  It  would  have  saved me  modifying
passes.c which was  not really an issue.  Everything  else would be as
complicated as it was or even more.

So as far as attracting new programmers, researchers and inexperienced
students  in  particular  is  concerned,  I  think  that  effort  that
implementing plugins would take would  be much better spent on keeping
documentation up to date,  possibly improving it (hey, Alexander, what
were your  problems, someone  might answer them  on Wiki  for others!)
and, in particular, staying as friendly and forgiving community as you
are (especially on IRC anyway :-).

IMHO 4 months  of learning how to work with GCC  internals seems to be
completely reasonable time for me. Compilers are complex and GCC is no
toy. (And plugins won't help with this, will they?)

Of  course,  I  understand  there  might be  other  and  perhaps  more
important uses of plugins.

Martin


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