[RFC] type safe trees

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:04:16AM -0400, Richard Kenner wrote:
>     But the support for cross compiling doesn't help your argument at all;
>     I don't understand what your point is here.
> 
> I don't see the cross-compiling issue as relevant.  *At some point*, if
> you are building a system meant for development, you have to take the
> bootstrap step and when you do, any complexity will make things more
> difficult.

But this lets you schedule native bootstrapping further down the chain,
at which point you need to have all languages working _anyway_!  Unless
"for development" you mean "just C".

>     I cross-compile to self-hosted systems all the time already.  So do
>     lots of other people on this list.  It's actually exceedingly
>     convenient.
> 
> Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.  It depends, among other things,
> on how much homogeneity there is between the host and target. There's
> a port to IA64/VMS going on now that's being done in a cross-environment
> and it's a *major pain*.

I can certainly see VMS being a pain in this regard, that's true. 
However, I've found that figuring out solutions for this sort of
homogeneity problem is well worthwhile in the long run.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz