Hi, On Nov 16, 2007 6:45 PM, Diego Novillo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Richard Kenner wrote: > > As was said before, the difficultly in people working with GCC is > > primarily lack of adequate documentation. Creating a "plugin" interface > > is certainly much more fun than writing documentation, but doesn't help > > this issue nearly as much. Moreover, writing documentation is not a > > potential legal threat while plugins are. To me, that argues strongly > > against plugins and in favor of much more documentation. > > No, this argument is fallacious. Plug-ins and poor documentation are > not, and should not be related. Poor documentation is an orthogonal > problem which ALSO needs to be addressed.
I brought up the documentation in this debate so let me clarify what I meant. I simply wanted to tell that you cannot expect that plugins are going to make life easier for newcomers. If that is your goal, you have to do something else. On the contrary, I have acknowledged there might be other and very beneficial reasons for having such a framework like the static analysis tools which I know nothing about. The conclusion is that the arguments in favor of plugins should concentrate on these technical advantages rather than on research. Such arguments, if explained a bit more thoroughly, might indeed be very interesting to hear (read). Finally, I also do not think plugins would all of a sudden allow anyone to hijack the compiler more easily than it is possible today. Martin
