Of Bounties and Mercenaries

Andrew Pinski pinskia@physics.uc.edu
Tue Apr 6 03:23:00 GMT 2004


On Apr 5, 2004, at 23:08, Stephan T. Lavavej wrote:

> [Ben Elliston]
>> This should be a side goal of future GCC work: to develop it
>> in a way that makes it easier for the uninitiated to hack on
>> it.  This includes removing complicated cruft and generally
>> trying to keep the code base small and as simple as possible.
>
> How about writing gcc in Modern, Standard C++?  You could do away with 
> your
> crazy garbage-collected C (double ugh).
>
> This inflammatory suggestion was brought to you by...

The other problem with this is that "Modern" "Standard" C++ has the 
following
problems:

1.  Makes a mess out of simplifying code from the compiling when the 
compiler
is being miscompiled itself.

2.  "Modern" means templates see 1.

3.  "Standard" means that we have to do more workarounds that Boost 
does, see 1.

4.  GC will be still there just in a slightly different form, see 2 and 
1.

5.  The number of bug reports about the C++ is high and we get more 
invalid bugs
each day, so we will then get bug reports about GCC not compiling on 
some C++
compiler, see 3.

Now if we figure out a good GC in that only parts of the compiler uses 
it, we will
no longer have all the issues we currently have because the part I am 
talking about
RTL (which is the most memory bounded part) will move from being in the 
GC into being
malloc'd and maybe pool alloced instead so it will be relatively close 
in memory.


Just some thoughts about using "Modern" "Standard" C++,
Andrew Pinski



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