>I view the current plug-in mechanism as a prototype. I think that we >should be working toward a much more robust mechanism, similar to >plug-ins for Eclipse, Firefox, MySQL, or other popular software stacks. >I certainly see no reason that plug-ins cannot work on any system that >has something roughly equivalent to dlopen (which Windows and OS X >certainly do). There's lots of prior art here. > >The key change we need to make is that instead of the current >"unstructured" approach where we essentially expose the entirety of the >GCC internals, we provide a stable, documented API that exposes a >portion of the internals. (It's fine with me if there's an expert mode >in which you can do anything you want, but it should be easy to stay >within the stable API if you want to do that.) I would start with an >API for "observing" (rather than modifying) the internal representation, > and add modification later. > >With observation alone, you could start to build interesting >static-checking tools, including, for example, domain-specific tools >that could check requirements of the Linux kernel. This would be a >powerful and exciting feature to have in GCC.
Agree with this vision, but it will take some time I guess ;) ... Grigori