On Tuesday, 5 June 2012 at 21:20:43 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2012-06-05 11:02, foobar wrote:
This argument was raised before. That "heap of problems" is as
vague as
the proposed AST system(s).
As far as I can tell, that heap of problems is mainly about
making it
harder to make internal breaking changes since the compiler is
no longer
a black box.
Now, I'd argue that having a stable API for those compiler
internals in
needed anyway. Besides the obvious benefits of a more modular
design
that better encapsulates the different layers of the
compilation
process, it allows us to implement a compiler as a set of
libraries
which benefits the tool ecosystem, IDEs, text-editors, lint
tools, etc.
Thools which could reuse subsets of these libraries (e.g.
think of
Clang's design and how it allowed for the vim auto-complete
plugin).
Even _without_ the AST macros I think it's a worthy goal to
pursuit, AST
macros simply make the outcome that much sweeter.
I couldn't agree more.
Can we move this to a DIP?
Paul
