On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 16:38 -0400, Kyle Girard wrote: > Hello, > > I am playing around with a plug-in for gcc but recently ran into the > road block that plug-ins aren't supported on Windows. Are there any > plans to add support for the windows platform in the future? If not, > what are the issues with supporting Windows and how much effort would it > be to add support? I'm assuming that since it's not done already there > has to be some difficulty somewhere...
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Windows & I never used it (except twice a year to change a mandatory password). I absolutely know nothing about Windows programming in the WIN32 API. Back to GCC plugins. If I remember correctly, we did slightly consider using libtldl, a wrapper providing dlopen variant http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Libltdl-interface.html but we later rejected that idea to avoid adding yet another library dependency to GCC. Apparently libltdl is supposed to work on Windows. Perhaps you could try to use it in your own variant of GCC. However, I would imagine that making the GCC trunk accept it is much more difficult (& personally I don't care that much anymore). Perhaps also they are some technical issues that makes using libltdl impractical. Maybe your concern should be to make sure that the "-rdynamic" functionality of Linux linker can be emulated on Windows. You really want most public symbols of GCC to be visible from your Windows GCC plugin. I heard it could be hard (i.e. boring) to achieve (perhaps requiring a dllexport on all public symbols of GCC). I'll be interested to know if you succeeded in making some GCC plugin work under Windows. In case you are very brave, you might even as an exercice port the MELT plugin http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/MELT to Windows! But I am not sure it is worth the effort. Cheers.
