Dear GCC developers, I've been following the plugins discussion and have seen various proposals. So far all of them seem to be focusing on plugins as dynamically linkable libraries (with all associated versioning and portability ballast). While you could also easily extend that, and integrate plugins more tightly with the compiler binary as static libraries (thereby creating customized compilers), I was wondering whether in future there might be a need to express tighter dependency between the code and the plugin(s) that the code might require... Or at least the dependency between the code and the plugin configuration options...
Should we not have a way to specify a plugin in the source itself? This could be achieved by tagging a function with a __plugin__ attribute (or a #pragma), exporting the PluginAPI as a bunch of built-in functions and having the compiler itself (1) ensure that such functions only call portable built-ins, and (2) compiling/executing or interpreting them as compilation passes. Then, the code can just #include a source-level plugin to have it available just for that translation unit. This is useful for at least one project I am working on... Regards, Pjotr Kourzanov
