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

[Richard Guenther]

2012/3/19 Ludovic Courtès <ludovic.courtes@inria.fr>:
> Hi,
>
> Richard Guenther <richard.guenther@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> But no, I'm not volunteering (I'm volunteering to do the review work).
>> The above has the same issue as the "we-want-to-be-more-like-LLVM"
>> stuff - it lacks the people to actually implement it, and GCC at its
>> present state still has to evolve, we can't and do not want to just spend
>> a complete release or two with just turning GCC upside-down.
>
> What David proposes looks great, but also fairly intrusive and
> development-intensive.
>
> Perhaps a more incremental approach could be taken.  For instance, I
> would argue that changes to the tree and GIMPLE APIs could be made
> conservatively, on the grounds that they are most likely used by
> plug-ins out there.  IOW, rather than a commitment to a stable API,
> which would hinder the work of GCC developers, this would be an informal
> agreement to not make the plug-in developers life too hard.
>
> In the example of name mangling, I’d just have wrapped in ‘extern "C"’
> all the headers listed in ‘PLUGIN_HEADERS’ in gcc/Makefile.in.  The
> rationale is that it simplifies plug-in maintenance, while not impeding
> development work in 4.7.

Well, that's _all_ headers.  Basically.  And exactly the problem.  There
will be never even API compatibility between major releases of GCC
with the current plugin "API".

Richard.