Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft [LWN.net]

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 31, 2014 15:10 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft by Del-
Parent article: Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Sounds like the api does little more than expose the internals of GCC.

That's pretty much what it does. That's also pretty much what LLVM's does, and I have explained in other comments how I suspect this is unavoidable for anything remotely like a compiler. Most of its 'internals' are, after all, either exposed in or implied by the very IR whose exposure is the whole point of a plugin interface in the first place.

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Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Jan 31, 2014 15:46 UTC (Fri) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link] (3 responses)

Then I am afraid the API is of little usage for anybody but GCC developers. I am not convinced it is hopeless though, there is probably a lot of functionality in GCC that can be of interest for external usage in a plugin setting, which does not force you into a global dependency spaghetti. Parsing comes to mind as something people have asked for. While IPO kind of takes in everything, I believe functionality like vectorization is more modular and local in nature. It is probably possible to split out rather high level stuff too, sacrificing the flexibility of the API for usability. For instance a high level JIT library (not sure how well it would work out for the Octave folks, but who knows) can be a good target since it is being designed as we speak.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Feb 3, 2014 10:16 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, the sort of plugin that's likely to be more useful (and which does indeed survive GCC upgrades without major changes a lot of the time) is the sort that does only analysis or data extraction to an external destination. But if you want to actually *change* anything, well, Lisp macros this is not: expect frequent breakage.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Feb 3, 2014 18:20 UTC (Mon) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (1 responses)

not my experience after like two dozen plugins, breakage has so far been trivial and independent of the plugin being passive or active (across gcc 4.5-4.9). i do however expect real breakage (of the kind that will force an effective rewrite) when tree/gimple/rtx enter the c++ conversion process.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

Posted Feb 4, 2014 14:54 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's both good and bad news, I'd say... :)