GCC plugins [those not listed in the wiki]

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

Hello All,

Do you know about GCC plugins not listed in the wiki page
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/plugins

In general, who is working on some GCC plugins?

I would imagine that there are some other plugins somewhere. I won't be
surprised if Google had some internal, proprietary, GCC plugin (but I
don't know, this is only a guess).

I also would imagine that some few very big software projects and
companies (i.e. coorporations with a more than one million line of code
single software, rich enough and with a management capable of
understanding the value of their specific GCC plugin) might have
developed some internal plugins to speed up their development process.

However, we did not hear anything like these.  Is it because some
organizations or persons are secretive regarding their GCC plugins
work, or is it because the GCC plugin idea did not catch yet? It is
indeed the case that there are important missing plugin hooks (as far
as I understand, it is not yet possible to code a new GCC front-end for
a new language as a plugin).

I also think that very big major free software projects (e.g Gnome,
Kde, the Linux kernel, ...) could benefit from their own dedicated GCC
plugins. For some wishes of GCC plugins, see slides 10-19 of my
presentation at
http://2010.rmll.info/Extending-the-GCC-compiler-with-MELT-to-suit-your-needs.html

It would be nice to hear about more people working on their GCC
plugins, even if they are not able or willing to show their plugin code
today.

My understand of GCC licensing is that the GCC license don't permit to
distribute proprietary software binaries compiled with the help of a
proprietary GCC plugin. However, that does not prohibit using a GCC
plugin for development purposes, and then compiling the proprietary
software for production release without using any plugin.

Of course, I do prefer that every GCC plugin would be public & GPLv3+,
but I am too old or too cynical to believe it will always be the case.
And I don't think at all that proprietary GCC plugins are a threat
against GCC or free software: they will be to costly to maintain, and I
believe that proprietary GCC plugins will in the long term be inclined
to become free (because of the burden of maintaining them)...

I am surprised by the lack of free (opensourced) GCC plugins so far.
Maybe it is just because very few linux distributions are packaging
gcc-4.5 today!  Perhaps we have to wait a bit.

When talking about GCC or MELT, I always introduce the idea of
application- or project- specific GCC plugins.

Cheers.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mine, sont seulement les miennes} ***