On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Nathan Froyd <froy...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:30:44AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:18, Manuel López-Ibáñez >> <lopeziba...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > Otherwise, as Ian said in another topic [2]: "I have a different fear: >> > that gcc will become increasing irrelevant". >> >> That's my impression, as well. It is true of just about every code >> base, if it cannot attract new developers, it stagnates and eventually >> whithers away. >> >> To attract new developers, GCC needs to modernize its internal >> structure. I have some thoughts on that, but progress has been slow, >> due mostly to resource constraints. > > Would you mind expanding--even just a little bit--on what bits need > modernizing? There's things like: > > http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Speedup_areas > > and perhaps: > > http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/general_backend_cleanup > > But neither of those really touches the middle-end, which is where I > presume the grousing vis-a-vis GCC vs. LLVM is really generated from. > Or it's the front-end support. I don't know. > > I know there are ugly parts still remaining in GCC. But my experience > (extending/parameterizing an LLVM optimization pass, writing/modifying > GCC middle-end optimization passes, some GCC backend hacking) suggests > that the complexity is similar. I think concrete "I tried X and it > sucked" or "these are the areas of suckage" would be helpful.
I think we have made good progress with cleaning up the frontend - backend interface. Still there remains cleanups and enhancements to be done with the pass-manager and how it interacts with the cgraph code. Oh, and of course some high-level overview documentation just about that pieces are missing. Richard. > -Nathan >