Richard Kenner wrote:
I have a different fear: that gcc will become increasing irrelevant,
as more and more new programmers learn to work on alternative free
compilers instead. That is neutral with regard to freedom, but it
will tend to lose the many years of experience which have been put
into gcc. In my view, if we can't even get ourselves together to
permit something as simple as plugins with an unstable API, then we
deserve to lose.
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.
The existence of a plug-in framework with bad/no documentation does not
make working with GCC any easier.
Diego.
