Sorry missed the reply all button, forwarding to the group
Joel
Sent from my phone
Begin forwarded message:
From: Joel Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: December 10, 2007 9:30:39 AM EST
To: Chris Lattner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] Clang comparison page
Sent from my phone
On Dec 10, 2007, at 1:04 AM, Chris Lattner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Dec 9, 2007, at 9:27 PM, Joel Nelson wrote:
I have no stake in Elsa, and I've never used it,
Your opinion is welcome! I've made some edits in response to your
feedback:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20071210/003255.html
but my thoughts:
Elsa is not a compiler, so I'm not sure that the following point
is appropriate:
"Elsa does not support native code generation."
Right. This gets to the "differences in goals" aspect of the
comparison. I should mention explicitly at the top that whether
you consider one of these to be a big deal depends on what your
personal goals are. I clarified this in the intro
Thanks I think that is well done
Also the following point seems to be a political (and practical,
granted) rather than a technical criticism:
"The Elsa community is extremely small and major development work
seems to have ceased in 2005, though it continues to be used by
other
projects (e.g. Oink). Clang has a vibrant community including
developers that are paid to work on it full time."
A small community is only a problem for those who do not have the
resources to contribute to the project themselves.
I mention this because it is a very big disadvantage for a lot of
people: it basically means that if you hit a bug in Elsa, you have
to fix it yourself or just work around it. In clang, you can
report the bug and it quite possible someone will fix it for you.
This means that even if you *could* fix the bug yourself, you might
find out that you don't have to, meaning you get more done in less
of *your* time.
Since as you say
Clang has plenty of resources,
There is no such thing as "plenty" :)
then I think Elsa could be adopted as
the C++ parser if there were no technical issues, or if the cost of
resolving the technical issues was less than the cost of a
reimplementation.
If a reader has the ability to reimplement an entire C++ compiler
from scratch and has the desire to do so, presumably they wouldn't
be looking at either clang or elsa :). The rest of the bullets
explain technical problems that prevent clang from adopting Elsa.
The only reason someone would be comparing Elsa and Clang today
would be if they are interested in helping to implement a c++ parser
themselves in clang (as you basically said).
If you are not including that audience, then there is really no
comparison to be made today since clang and elsa are completely
disjoint with respect to the ability to parse c++, and every other
thing.
Therefore you are speaking to the group of people who have the
ability to contribute to a c++ parser. If they disagree with your
technical arguments, they themselves have the power to correct the
problem of the small Elsa community.
The issue I have with this argument in general is that it seems to
be the same fallacious argument made by popular American
politicians: "get with the winning team."
I updated the bullet to try to make it more clear what I'm getting
at, please take a look and let me know if it helps.
I just thought these two points may be unfair given the scope of
this
doc is stated as "We restrict the discussion to very specific
technical points to avoid controversy where possible." Maybe its
this
statement which should be changed, instead.
I think it is true that the Elsa community is "extremely small", do
you disagree with that part?
No I think you are completely correct. I just wouldn't call that a
technical point. That may be the *result* of technical weaknesses
(as you argue well), or it could be the result of a lack of the kind
of promotion you do for clang. Either way I think it is not itself
material.
Basically I think Clang can win on technical merits, so why not
leave it at that?
Thanks,
Joel
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