Mark Mitchell wrote:
Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
It is really unfortunate the annoucement did not mention plugins,
another major feature of GCC. Why ?
I consider plug-ins an important feature for the future of GCC. I gave
a talk this past week as the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in
which I made the case for modularity of GCC, including plug-ins. I
(assisting David Edelsohn, who lead the effort) worked with the FSF to
get acceptance for plug-ins for a long time. So, it's not that I don't
like plug-ins.
But, I don't think that plug-ins are yet a useful thing to announce in
what is essentially a "marketing" context. Most users won't be able to
use them yet. We have some infrastructure; we don't have a lot of use
of that infrastructure yet.
My feeling is that the simple availability of this plugin infrastructure
is a significant *marketing* argument for GCC. We don't need useful
plugin to reliably exist to use that advertising argument.
And while I agree that most ordinary users won't be able to use plugins
[*] they will probably be able to ask for plugins (e.g. to pay
consultant or GCC centered companies to do so).
I am not sure that as soon as modules or plugins have been added to
other big software projects (like Linux Kernel, GTK, ...), most users of
these projects have been able to use plugins immediately. Plugins are
always a long term effort, because they are an invitation for people
*outside* the community to participate in development, and this takes
time & effort.
Note [*]: are we sure that other announced features, like Link Time
Optimization, are *easily* usable by *ordinary* GCC users? I don't know,
and I am not sure... Perhaps most ordinary users only know about -O1 or
-O3...
Cheers.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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