Dear all, We are two students in a Compiler Design course who have been assigned to work on a gcc beginners project. We have chosen the project on making pseudo-templated containers, and we had some questions about the semantics you want from them. The gcc page specifically mentioned splay trees and hash tables, so we will ask about those.
The goal of the project was stated to be the elimination of abstraction penalties. The hash table and splay tree both store entries by pointer (except that splay tree can cast ints to the pointer and back out). Would you prefer a generic container that held items by value? We could do this, but it would break code that expects aliases to be preserved. We are currently working under the assumption that it is acceptable for all of our function-like macros to take the type of the stored elements. Do you agree? Is it okay for lookup function macros to take the type they are looking up? If we can take the type, we can make the semantics of returning pointers much more elegant. Thanks for your help, Patrick Moran Walter Maguire
