On Mon, 2010-05-31 at 08:53 -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote: > Basile Starynkevitch wrote: > > > At last, there is a very important issue when switching to C++. What is > > our "ideal" class hierarchy? Do we aim at a large forest, or on the > > contrary at a single tree of classes, so we have a single root class, > > providing common services (dump or debug printing, serialization, ...) > > or not? > > There's no reason to get into these kinds of questions at this point. > The goal is not to reimplement GCC from the ground up using modern > OO/C++ techniques. The goal is simply to permit ourselves to use C++ > features where appropriate in the codebase.
Except that perhaps these questions are important for any gengtype enhancement. In particular, one could consider that marking a GTY-ed data would be done by a virtual method (generated by gengtype), and then having every GTY-ed data inheriting from an abstract class providing this method will make both gengtype & ggc*.c simpler. The same can be said about PCH serialization, or debug dumping. In addition, if we want to parse C++ class declaration from gengtype, that could be much more difficult than parsing struct (as gengtype is doing today). This is why I thought perhaps of some simpler syntax for the description of all our GTY-ed data, which would generate appropriately the C++ header files describing them. But nothing is possible without a rather broad consensus. Nobody will start a branch on these ideas without having some probability that such changes will be accepted. Regards. -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faiencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
