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Re: Notes from the GROW'10 workshop panel (GCC research opportunities workshop)
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Nathan Froyd <froydnj@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:30:44AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:18, Manuel López-Ibáñez
>> <lopezibanez@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Otherwise, as Ian said in another topic [2]: "I have a different fear:
>> > that gcc will become increasing irrelevant".
>>
>> That's my impression, as well. ?It is true of just about every code
>> base, if it cannot attract new developers, it stagnates and eventually
>> whithers away.
>>
>> To attract new developers, GCC needs to modernize its internal
>> structure. ?I have some thoughts on that, but progress has been slow,
>> due mostly to resource constraints.
>
> Would you mind expanding--even just a little bit--on what bits need
> modernizing? ?There's things like:
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Speedup_areas
>
> and perhaps:
>
> http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/general_backend_cleanup
>
> But neither of those really touches the middle-end, which is where I
> presume the grousing vis-a-vis GCC vs. LLVM is really generated from.
> Or it's the front-end support. ?I don't know.
>
> I know there are ugly parts still remaining in GCC. ?But my experience
> (extending/parameterizing an LLVM optimization pass, writing/modifying
> GCC middle-end optimization passes, some GCC backend hacking) suggests
> that the complexity is similar. ?I think concrete "I tried X and it
> sucked" or "these are the areas of suckage" would be helpful.
I think we have made good progress with cleaning up the frontend - backend
interface. Still there remains cleanups and enhancements to be done
with the pass-manager and how it interacts with the cgraph code.
Oh, and of course some high-level overview documentation just about
that pieces are missing.
Richard.
> -Nathan
>