Continuity problems

Posted Mar 22, 2012 23:59 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
In reply to: Continuity problems by james_ulrich
Parent article: GCC celebrates 25 years with the 4.7.0 release

It's hard to read BECAUSE it is not in C++, obviously.

Although the fundamental reason it's hard to read is because it's not fully a library like LLVM/Clang, so they don't need to write clean reusable code with documented interfaces, and it shows.

The real question is: does it make sense to try to clean up, modularize and "C++ize" gcc?

Or it is simpler and more effective to just stop development on GCC, and move to work on a GPL or LGPL licensed fork of LLVM, porting any good things GCC has that LLVM doesn't?

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Continuity problems

Posted Mar 23, 2012 6:59 UTC (Fri) by james_ulrich (guest, #83666) [Link]

Why does everyone pass around using C++ as some magic bullet that fixes all ugliness now and forever? It doesn't and it never will. The only lesson to be learnt from LLVM is that, when *starting from scratch*, a compiler can be well written in C++. Extrapolating that to "GCC's main problem is is not being written in C++ and doing so will fix all our problems" is plain idiotic.

Even if you start coding in C++, you still need to think about how to split long functions, ridiculous if() statements and make other general ugliness clearer. Take this (random example, there are much worse ones):

if (REG_P (src) && REG_P (dest)
&& ((REGNO (src) < FIRST_PSEUDO_REGISTER
&& ! fixed_regs[REGNO (src)]
&& CLASS_LIKELY_SPILLED_P (REGNO_REG_CLASS (REGNO (src))))
|| (REGNO (dest) < FIRST_PSEUDO_REGISTER
&& ! fixed_regs[REGNO (dest)]
&& CLASS_LIKELY_SPILLED_P (REGNO_REG_CLASS (REGNO (dest))))))

How exactly will C++ make this more obvious? Ofcourse it won't.

And, no, GCC not being a library is not it its main problem either.