Support for export keyword to use with C++ templates ?

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Paolo Carlini <pcarlini@gmail.com> writes:

> Anyway, modulo a possible deprecation (I believe M$ through Herb  is
> still pushing for it) I think the slightly more serious side of this
> export thing is something Mark, if I'm not mistaken, said some time
> ago, at the very beginning of the Lto ideas, to the effect that
> probably some infrastructure could be also used to attack the
> implementation of export. Does that make sense to anybody?

The LTO infrastructure could probably be somewhat useful to anybody
who wants to tackle export.  However, it will only be somewhat useful.
LTO provides the ability to write out GIMPLE.  But to support export
you need to instead stream out the C++ frontend representation, which
is trees.  In the gcc way, there is overlap between GIMPLE and trees,
but they are not the same thing.  So a bunch more work will still be
required even for the first basic step of export, which is the ability
to write out a parse tree.

Ian