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RE: [plugins-ici-cloning-instrumentation] new GCC plugin developements
Just one more issue to mention (particularly for those who have been writing ICI plugins).
ICI sometime has been using environment variables inside GCC with its own invocation flags
(-fici) and dynamic library loading.
Naturally, Joern will remove duplicate dynamic library handling and invocation flags from ICI to
use the plugin functionality from GCC 4.5.
As for environment variables inside GCC - we needed it for transparent program analysis
and optimizations but I remember that there were several concerns about that (I think
Richard mentioned several times that it complicated debugging if there are problems),
so we will remove them too. We will use current plugin flags to pass parameters to
the plugins (we can pass a configuration file I guess that will be parsed by our plugins
if there is lots of information to pass) and if we need to do transparent program
analysis and optimization we will use a script and a wrapper around GCC that translated
our environment variables into flags. I already did that recently for MILEPOST GCC so it
should be easy.
But for now we assume that it's fine to use environment variables (such as to control
verbose output or pass some parameters) in plugins themselves ... However, eventually
we should also use some configuration files for plugins that can be easily shared with the community
if there is a bug in plugins ...
Cheers,
Grigori