On Sunday, 23 December 2012 at 12:20:01 UTC, Tobias Pfaff wrote:
So the nice thing to have here would be a standardized
interface to the
compiler, or even compiler as a library, with direct data
access to this
kind of information.
Yes the concept of what a complier is, how how it is implemented
should be redefined. The current concept is monolithic, you
cannot easily extend it (no one can, not even the compiler devs),
or make use of it outside of an extremely narrow usage range.
Restructuring the compiler into a much more flexible and
extensible tool is something that should be dealt at a later
point, but there is a much bigger problem that needs to be taken
on concerning how the language specification is being managed.
Without a clear language specification that is accessible to
everyone (try downloading it), and without a defined process to
manage it, no one really knows fully what the language is
supposed to be doing, and that limits severely what people are
able to do in many areas. There's also a huge amount of endless
discussions that never seem to conclude, and when there is a
conclusion often the conclusion is not implemented or even
retained for future reference.
--rt
