AST/symbol table manipulation is way faster than reparsing code.
People keep talking about D and Go compilation speed, while I was already
enjoying such compile times back in 1990 with Turbo Pascal in computers much
less powerfull than my laptop.
But C and C++ with their 70's compiler technology, somehow won the market
share,
and then people started complaining about compilation speeds.
Adele Golberg, once wrote a paper telling how C made the compiler technology
regress several decades.
--
Paulo
"Alex Rønne Petersen" wrote in message
news:jo1s2b$2bie$1...@digitalmars.com...
On Friday 04 May 2012 08:56 PM, Andrew Wiley wrote:
On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 1:46 PM, foobar <f...@bar.com
<mailto:f...@bar.com>> wrote:
On Friday, 4 May 2012 at 18:30:32 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
On 5/4/12, foobar <f...@bar.com <mailto:f...@bar.com>> wrote:
The di files are mostly meant to be machine read (e.g. the
compiler) and this belongs as part of the library file in
order
to provide ease of use and maintain the relationship between
the
binary code and it's interface.
maintaining two sets of files that could easily get out of
sync
and *not* using the docs is way more insane.
I'd say the docs are more likely to be out of sync than .di code.
If
the .di code is really out of sync you'll likely even get linker
errors. And not everything ends up being documented.
And then what about existing tools like IDEs and editors. E.g.
autocomplete wouldn't work anymore.
I'd say you'd be wrong.
Both di and docs are auto-generated from the same source.
As I said docs are designed for human consumption. This includes all
sorts of features such as a table of contents, a symbol index, the
symbols should have links, the docs provide usage examples, etc, etc.
Docs can be put online thus ensuring they're always up-to-date.
Tools should either read the data from the lib file or retrieve it
from the web. Keeping separate local di files is simply insane.
And really, have you never heard of Java? How about Pascal?
Should I continue back in history to all the languages that
implemented this feature decades ago?
C/C++ is a huge PITA with their nonsense compilation model which we
shouldn't have copied verbatim in D.
I like the idea, but what about templates? For them, you'd basically be
stuffing source code into the object files (unless you came up with a
way to store the AST, but that seems like the effort/benefit ratio
wouldn't be worth it since we currently have no way to preserve an AST
tree between compiler runs).
Otherwise, I find this idea very compelling. I'm sure there are probably
other issues, though.
Storing the AST would basically equal storing the source code except
'trivia' like white space and unneeded tokens. At that point, you may as
well ship the source.
--
- Alex
