On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 11:26:36AM -0800, Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote: > My feeling is that Google's Go (quite a nice language from the slides I just > have read) is almost "canonically" the case > for a front-end plugin.
I have some major concerns about this suggestion. Isn't this a recipe for getting people to stop contributing changes to gcc? You seem to want people to use plugins for everything. I would prefer to see more limited uses. Plugins are appropriate for small, specialized additions to gcc that aren't generally useful enough, or stable enough, to include in the main gcc distribution. For example, a specialized static checker, or a pass to add an unusual kind of instrumentation, or something to gather statistics on a body of source code. They weren't intended as a way of attaching complete new front ends or complete new back ends. That was the thing that RMS feared the most, and he had at least some justification: would we have a C++ compiler or an Objective-C compiler if the companies who employed the original authors had the alternative of hooking into GCC without contributing their code? There's some evidence that they would not have. We currently lack enough plugin hooks to give a complete front end a stable interface, and I would argue that this is a feature.
