incremental compiler project

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

On 02/09/15 22:44, David Kunsman wrote:
> Hello, I just read over the incremental compiler project on the gcc
> wiki...and I am excited to try to finish it.  I am just wondering if
> it is even wanted anymore because it is 7-8 years old.  Does anybody
> know if this project is wanted anymore?

The overall goal of the project is worthwhile, however, it is unclear whether 
the approach envisioned in the wiki page will lead to the desired benefits. See 
http://tromey.com/blog/?p=420 which is the last status report that I am aware 
of. In addition to that, the implementation itself would already be incredibly 
challenging for anyone with many years of experience in GCC.

I do not wish to discourage you, perhaps you will manage to pull it off. On the 
bright side, GCC has improved a lot since 2008 and there are many new 
improvements that will probably make the incremental compiler easier to 
implement today, such as binding-oracle in libcc1, global state removal by 
libgccjit, recent modularization work, etc.

If you have never submitted any changes to GCC, I will strongly recommend that 
you start with something small and immediately useful such as any of the 
EasyHacks (https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/EasyHacks). Then, move to something more 
complex and related to the incremental compiler, but still self-contained such 
as "The C front end has been modified to lex the entire file at once". This 
would be useful on its own since it is likely to speed-up the C FE (and it is 
what C++ already does).

Cheers,

Manuel.