Re: Defending GCC considered futile

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 05:37:25 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 15:50:06 -0500
> > From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > 
> > On Wed, 11 Feb 2015 18:54:37 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> > wrote:
> > > > > > Modularizing GCC is not discouraged.  It actually happens
> > > > > > as we speak, check out the latest developments in GCC 5
> > > > > > and GDB.
> > > > > 
> > > > > If this is the case, what is the problem with Emacs directly
> > > > > linking against the GCC front end to get access to the C and
> > > > > C++ AST?
> > > > 
> > > > I don't know, you tell me.
> > > 
> > > Btw, I don't really know what you mean by "front end" above,
> > > but if you think the modularization of GCC means separating the
> > > back-end, i.e. the part that is target-dependent, then that's
> > > not what how it's done in this case.  There's more than one way
> > > to make a compiler modular and easy to use by other programs.
> > 
> > I mostly just meant "getting API access to the part that parses
> > things and generates an AST", nothing about GCC's architecture in
> > particular was implied.
> 
> Then we shouldn't care if it's front end, back end, or "middle-end"
> that provides that.

Clearly. All that matters is getting convenient access to
complete information about the syntactic structure of the code
in the buffer, not what we name the chunk of code that we call to
provide that data, or what people consider that code to be part of. :)


Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com