On Saturday 03 December 2005 20:43, Mark Mitchell wrote: > There is one advantage I see in the LTO design over LLVM's design. In > particular, the LTO proposal envisions a file format that is roughly at > the level of GIMPLE. Such a file format could easily be extended to be > at the source-level version of Tree used in the front-ends, so that > object files could contain two extra sections: one for LTO and one for > source-level information. The latter section could be used for things > like C++ "export" -- but, more importantly, for other tools that need > source-level information, like IDEs, indexers, checkers, etc.
I actually see this as a disadvantage. IMVHO dumping for "export" and front-end tools and for the optimizers should not be coupled like this. Iff we decide to dump trees, then I would hope the dumper would dump GIMPLE only, not the full front end and middle-end tree representation. Sharing a tree dumper between the front ends and the middle-end would only make it more difficult again to move to sane data structures for the middle end and to cleaner data structures for the front ends. Gr. Steven