Florian Klämpfl schrieb:
too much supported platforms and
features and too few developers working on bug fixing.
Just as a side node, development of open bugs during the last years:
summary_graph_cumulative_bydate.php.png
This situation could be improved by an OO rewrite - better
modularization, separation and encapsulation of the entire compiler parts.
In the past months I've been working on several aspects of such refactoring:
- moving global variables into objects (mainly current_module)
- turning back-ends into classes
- separation of parser (front-end) from AST processing (building AST,
optimization, code generation)
When we agree to turn the current codebase into such an OO approach,
eventually adding documentation, the maintenance could be simplified a
lot. During my experiments I've learned how fragile the current state of
the compiler codebase is - even a minor change can have inpredictable
consequences in other parts of the code. Chasing and fixing an bug would
be much easier, when it can be isolated in a specific compiler module,
and then can be fixed with only local impact. Visual debug features (AST
treeview, ASM preview...) can be added without affecting the release
versions - such features already turned out to be very useful, in all my
decompiler development.
Since such refactoring affects really *all* existing units, it could be
done in a very new repository, resulting in an FPC 3.0 version. Then we
can agree which road to follow - the old spaghetti code or the new OO
approach - or whether we fork and follow both branches independently.
DoDi
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