Daniel Berlin wrote:
2. It natively supports Alpha, Sparc, IA64, X86, and PowerPC. An LLVM->RTL converter is not that hard, which simply removes the entire argument anyway.
I see the phrase "doing X is not that hard" in response to many questions about this proposal. Now, I'm arguing the difficulty of the given tasks, but even a simple task requires someone to do it. And maintain it.
Which begs the question: Are these proposals practical within the existing GCC developer community, particularly over the long term (years, decades)?
How did moving to tree-ssa affect the developer community? Did more people come on board, are fewer people working on GCC now, or did it have no net influence on the developer base?
I honestly don't know, hence my queries.
The bottom line I just don't see any sane argument for redo'ing what others have done very well, unless using that will require more resources than doing it from scratch. I can't honestly believe that the work required to make LLVM usable for us is anywhere near the work we are going to need to tree-ssa to do the same things LLVM does.
Reverse the question: What does tree-ssa do that LLVM does not? I know that's been covered to some extent in these threads, but maybe someone knowledgable could lay out a very simple bullet point list comparing what needs to be done with both plans.
I'm not saying which way GCC should go -- I merely think that all the consequences need to be considered carefully.
-- Scott Robert Ladd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Coyote Gulch Productions http://www.coyotegulch.com
