[Patch, Fortran] OOP: merging fortran-dev to trunk?

[Toon Moene]

Janus Weil wrote:

> I have been discussing quite a bit with Paul and Tobias on how to
> proceed. It's a bit of a nasty situation, since we do have *some* OOP
> in 4.5, but for sure it won't be perfect. [One of the most tricky
> aspects is that there are situations where compilation goes through
> fine, but stuff fails at runtime (cf. PR41829). These issues are the
> same on the trunk and fortran-dev.]
> 
> My proposal would be to merge the current state of fortran-dev to the
> trunk now, and leave the advanced TBP stuff that Paul is working on
> for 4.6. As I said, the features on the branch can be considered to be
> rather stable (the more experimental stuff has not been committed
> yet), and most of it is rather low-risk wrt regressions, since it is
> hidden behind BT_CLASS guards.

 From a birds-eye perspective (as I haven't followed the progress on 
this carefully), I think that - whatever we do - 4.5 will contain *some* 
OOP.

The best way forward, as far as I am concerned, is to commit to trunk 
all from fortran-dev that is deemed usable and stable enough, and then 
try to *document* what works and what doesn't.

That won't solve everything for our users, because they often do not 
read the complete documentation before starting to use the compiler 
(something that Craig Burley was very well aware of - he was an ex 
documentation writer).

But at least it will give a lot of people a usable OOP compiler - with 
nice promises for 4.6 ;-)

Thanks for all of your (and Paul's, Tobias') great work !

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.org - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
At home: http://moene.org/~toon/
Progress of GNU Fortran: http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/changes.html