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Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?
- From: "Martin Jambor" <jamborm at matfyz dot cz>
- To: "Alexander Lamaison" <awl03 at doc dot ic dot ac dot uk>
- Cc: "Diego Novillo" <dnovillo at google dot com>, "Richard Kenner" <kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu>, iant at google dot com, Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot com, fleury at labri dot fr, gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:01:28 +0100
- Subject: Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?
- References: <473CBFAD.9060400@google.com> <01fb01c82842$2ae01420$80a03c60$@ic.ac.uk>
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