VTA merge - introduction

[Mark Mitchell]

Arnaud Charlet wrote:
>> I would appreciate if VTA were not merged until the community has
>> reached a consensus that it actually wants this feature.
> 
> FWIW, I find this feature very desirable/important, the situation with
> debugging at anything else than -O0 has gotten worse and worse in
> the past years, and VTA seems definitely to go in the right direction.

I agree with both points.

The feature is clearly both desirable and important; we all want
debugging improvements of the kind promised by VTA.  But, the last time
these patches were discussed there were a lot of questions raised about
the technical approach.

The VTA implementation is an extensive set of patches, with impact
throughout the compiler; it's not "just" an optimization pass that can
be replaced if a better approach is found.  We ought to make sure that
we're happy with the concepts before we merge it in.

So, I think the thing to do is to get all the patches together, together
with an overview description of the functionality provided and the
decisions made, and then allow people a chance to review them.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713