On 04/10/2012 11:39 PM, Miles Bader wrote: > Torvald Riegel <trie...@redhat.com> writes: >> I hate to bring this up, but in my personal experience, getting started >> with LLVM was _much_ easier than with GCC. LLVM is a much newer >> codebase, so that's an advantage unrelated to the language. > > I dunno, I've some experience with LLVM as well, and I actually found > it rather more difficult to "get started with" than gcc... > > Part of this is, of course, is that gcc has excellent internals > documentation, whereas LLVM's is almost non-existant, but LLVM's much > more "proper C++" coding style didn't seem to help a whole lot with > making it understandable (and if anything may have made it _worse_).
My guess would be that there is no right and wrong here, it really depends on what any given individual is familiar with. For example, I certainly wouldn't have guessed that a GET_FIELD_DECL macro would cause problems for autocompletion, since I personally don't use that kind of thing. However, what's important in a project is to pick conventions and stick to them. For example, a lot of people initially loathe the GNU C indentation style, but professional developers adapt themselves to whatever style a project has chosen. There is nothing to be gained but anarchy if personal preferences lead to churn of the "let's reindent" or "let's rewrite in <my favourite language>" kind. In the short term, a partial conversion to C++ gains us nothing. Even ignoring the bugs inevitably caused by any such project, we'll end up with a strange mish-mash of styles for a very long time, which instead of helping anyone can only lead to confusion. I don't see anyone committing to invest the time in converting even an entire subsystem let alone the whole compiler. Maybe a subsystem conversion would be a good thing to try on a branch and then present the results to the community for evaluation. This would be better than lowering the barrier now for all sorts of random but uncoordinated conversion efforts. Bernd
