On Fri, 19 Sep 2008, Brendon Costa wrote: > 1) Dont allow additional search paths for plugins
I think we do want to allow the user to specify such a path on the compiler command line, in addition to searching the standard libsubdir or libexecsubdir location. > 3) Somehow embed something in all plugins that can safely be queried, > which indicates the version/build of GCC the plugin belongs to and only > load plugins that match. I think the required GCC version should be exported by the plugin - in addition to the plugin's own version and bug-reporting URL which should go in the --version and --help output if those options are used together with plugin-loading options. It should also export the configured target triplet since plugins built for different targets on the same host can't be expected to be compatible (they may use target macros internally). We should make it clear that e.g. 4.5.0 and 4.5.1 are not necessarily compatible for plugins; that's an inevitable consequence of exporting all the GCC-internal interfaces. Thus the full version number is what should be checked, rather than trying to keep interfaces stable within e.g. the 4.5 series. But we do want plugins to be usable from both cc1 and cc1plus, etc., unless they use front-end-internal interfaces (which some may wish to do, at the expense of only working with one language). > Do we say for the first version we use -rdynamic and don't support > windows (will need build machinery to disable all this on windows if we > do) or do we add the export macros and library and support the windows > platform from the beginning (Are there any other platforms with quirks > not covered here)? There are many supported non-ELF hosts with their own peculiarities - not just Windows - Darwin (Mach-O), HP-UX on 32-bit PA (SOM), older BSD versions (a.out), Tru64, VMS, DJGPP, AIX. I think it's very likely the support will initially be optional and only supported on a subset of hosts - but with nothing in the core compiler moved to plugins this should not cause any problems with the invariant of generating the same code for a target independent of host. -- Joseph S. Myers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
