GCC unplugged

The original poster writes:

> Out of the 6 months, 4 were spent learning the GCC internals and
> fighting the GCC build process, 1 was spent writing up leaving 1 month
> of actual productive research... 

and makes this a point for plugins. But... Even when there is a plugin 
architecture and you write plugins you will have the same starting time
before you get productive. This is just a strawman argument.

Ciao, Marcus