On 06/03/2010 12:09 PM, Richard Guenther wrote: > On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 12:51 PM, Robert Dewar <de...@adacore.com> wrote: >> Steven Bosscher wrote: >> >>> Indeed. It is, well, perhaps not surprising, but quite annoying (to me >>> at least) that a possible move to C++ as implementation language of >>> GCC is so much bigger news than all the amazing amounts of work done >>> in the last few years on things like LTO, the vectorizer, IRA, etc... >> >> And indeed you have to worry a bit that productive work on critical >> areas like this may be siphoned off developing, reviewing and testing >> changes from C to C++ whose benefit may often be much less than the >> work involved in doing them. >> >> Redoing working code in language A into language B is always a bit >> dubious. I would be very cautious and judicious in allowing changes >> to existing working code. New stuff is a different matter, and where >> there is an argument in any case for reengineering it may make sense. > > Indeed ;) I'd like us to switch to the C / C++ common soon (thus, > use C for stage1 and C++ for stage2 and stage3). That will help > us sort out problems on the various host/target combinations that > will surely exist. > > Then wait for this special very-nice-and-we-definitely-want-to-have-it > patch that requires C++. And only then switch to C++. > > (you could argue that we can as well use C++ for stage1 and C for > stage2 and stage3, that would work for me as well but would > for example not allow starting to use C++ in the Java frontend only). > > With all this discussion I am more and more back-pedaling on > the conversion to C++ - there is > very much cleanup work to do inside GCC that does not require > or benefit from C++. I'd not like to see people jumping on the > let's convert GCC to C++ wagon leaving all the obvious existing > problems unaddressed. We do not have an implementation language > problem - we do have many others.
Right, but I didn't think there was any plan to convert en masse to C++ -- just to allow people to use it where appropriate. Apart from anything else, there's always a nonzero probablility of breaking something. I'll turn that into a question: does any GCC maintainer intend to convert working code into C++, with no substantive changes? Andrew.
