On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 02:45:55AM -0500, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Jakub Jelinek <ja...@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 01:27:29AM +0200, Eric Botcazou wrote:
> >> > 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.
> >>
> >> IMO the killer conversion would be vec.[ch], which is a very clever piece
> >> of
> >> code but is almost impossible to use without copy-and-pasting existing
> >> cases.
> >> I think that a proper C++ implementation would be a very convincing
> >> argument.
> >
> > But IMHO not sufficient for a switch. The GCC C++ proponents should do more
> > on a branch to convince. Yes, the syntactic suger for vec.h isn't very
> > nice, but the actual implementation is very clever and heavily tuned for
> > GCC's needs; if we convert to C++ just because of vec.[ch], we open
> > ourselves to what is being discussed in this thread, people who would like
> > to turn GCC codebase into yet another LLVM, which not everybody finds
> > actually very readable and maintainable code, would start doing so.
>
> I have been having difficulty following the twists and the turns and
> the goal post moving.
> Are you essentially requiring to see GCC rewritten in C++ before we
> switch to C++?
No, but I'd like to see more than just vec.[ch] conversion alone and see what
benefits it actually brings to GCC if any with real numbers of what it means
to compile time, compilation memory usage, etc.
Jakub
