GCC 5? (was Re: GCC 4.7.0RC: Mangled names in cc1)

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2012, David Malcolm wrote:

> Proposed outcome
[...]
> Current architectural issues
[...]

Not many people commented on the architectural goals document Diego and I 
posted at <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-12/msg00103.html>.  Many of your 
ideas seem potentially useful additions to it.  I hope Diego will have 
time soon to push more of the goals and development conventions through 
community approval and move them to the main website; as we do this, 
detailed feedback from people interested in these issues is certainly 
welcome.

> * no namespacing: seemingly arbitrary naming convention for symbols.
> Would want to add some namespace prefix to the public symbols (vars and
> fns), and to the types.

Namespaces are one thing that could well be addressed using C++ namespaces 
(both for GCC itself, and for particular areas within it).

> * actually implementing the thing!

Yes.  Agreement on general goals is certainly useful; it provides an 
overall context for patch review so a modularity patch doesn't get 
unhelpful comments to the effect that "this whole modularity idea is 
ill-conceived".  But what's really needed is the investment of many 
person-years in improvements directed towards well-defined goals.

> It seems that GCC has provided an API for registering plugins, but no
> API for the plugins to then actually use...  Perhaps the C++ move would

As regards the limited number of places where plugins get called, the idea 
(I think) is that as and when a plugin author wants plugins to be involved 
at a particular point in GCC, they should contribute appropriate patches 
(rather than GCC developers speculatively guessing what plugins might 
want).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com