Quoting David Brown <da...@westcontrol.com>:
But it strikes me that a system where the main programs and the plugins
are directly linking to each other is going to make it hard to separate
the development of the two sides, and hard to distribute compiled
plugins that will work with separately compiled main binaries. And
surely it is this sort of separation and modularisation that is the
whole purpose of the plugins?
For the "average" gcc user running Linux and with a single version of
gcc producing native code, it doesn't matter much - they've either
compiled their plugins at the same time as their gcc binary, or (more
likely) their Linux distribution maintainers compiled them at the same
time.
No, both binary plugins and their sources are generally much smaller
than the GCC distribution. And a plugin is built faster from source.
Also, it is often more straightforward to combine different plugins
than to take different patchsets, merge them into gcc sources, and
bootstrap the compiler.
But gcc is far more flexible than that. I use gcc for perhaps six
different targets on a regular basis, with a variety of versions of gcc
for some of the these targets, with different hosts (Windows or Linux),
and with different target OSes (mostly bare metal elf, sometimes Linux,
and some old bare metal coff). To my mind, a plugin that works for
gcc-mips-linux-4.5 should work without recompilation for
gcc-arm-elf-4.6, assuming the same host.
It depends on the plugin. If to uses target-specific macros or types,
(e.g.: FIRST_PSEUDO_REGISTER, CUMULATIVE_ARGS) or invokes functions
specific to a target (could be autoconfigured), then I wouldn't expect this
to work. Also, the name mangling has to match.
Still, recompiling the plugin for two different gcc builds tend to be much
more lightweight than to rebuild & install two gcc configurations.
And it should be possible to
build the plugin binary for Linux, Window s (native/mingw, not just
cygwin) and other major gcc hosts (Mac, BSDs, etc.). Like it or not, a
great deal of cross-compilation embedded development is done using gcc
on windows, and it's a shame if something as potentially powerful as
gcc plugins is not available to those users.
Well, it's their choice (or their employers/sysadmins), we can't force them
to switch to a more powerful development platform. As you said, there are
a number of major gcc host platforms available, and several elf-based ones
run on the same hardware as MS windows.
