-fdump-translation-unit considered harmful (was Re: cp tree question)

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:

| We should get rid of -fdump-translation-unit.  It has never done what
| people think it does, the output format has never been documented, no
| one cares to improve either of those things,

Actually people do care about -fdump-translation-unit -- except that
nodbody want to check in the improvements because otherwise they would
loss an "advantage" over competitors.  some maintainers do get request
to improve it though :-/

| and we now have
| tree-pretty-print.c which is language-independent and far easier to
| read.  No, it's not machine parseable, but neither is
| -fdump-translation-unit's format, if you really sit down and think
| about it.

Well, -fdump-translation-unit is more machine readale than
tree-pretty-print.c which is awful at the moment.  I do know of
several distinct parsers of -fdump-translation-unit.

I intented to improve it -- and sent a note in that respect to Mark --
but we got into stage 3, after that.  I could have pretented that it
was a "clean up" patch, as many other patches that got in despite
being in stage 3.

| 
| zw

-- 
                                                       Gabriel Dos Reis 
                                           gdr@integrable-solutions.net