nemanjai wrote:
> You can just use `({ ... })` to achieve that same goal with inline assembly
> (and write doesn't even need that, you can do it with a single statement).
> I'm not convinced the intrinsics gain you anything.
Hmm... I think there's a bit of a disconnect here between the point I am trying
to make and your responses. I have attempted to illustrate that this is meant
as a **usability** enhancement. Not something that will increase the expressive
power of the language. Any usability feature, more or less by nature, can be
achieved in **another way**. Whatever usability enhancement one proposes, there
can always be a rebuttal suggesting that the **semantics** can be achieved
through some other mechanism. Sometimes that mechanism is an exotic one such as
GNU statement expressions.
I view the compiler as a tool that users use to achieve the goal of developing
and building their project and its usability has a direct contribution to the
users' ability to effectively achieve their goal. If a tool can easily provide
a convenient and consistent mechanism to achieve a specific goal without
significant drawbacks, it should probably do so.
Suggesting that a facility the compiler can easily provide can be achieved with
something like a GNU statement expression, in my opinion is in direct
opposition to the goal of improving the usability of the compiler. Calls to
functions/intrinsics are a fundamental aspect of a language such as C/C++ that
everyone is familiar with. GNU statement expressions exist in an entirely
different realm and are familiar to an exceedingly small subset of developers.
I feel that the argument of "you don't need this, you can achieve it in another
way" is only meaningful if "this" has significant drawbacks or if "another way"
is equivalently convenient. As an absurd example that regresses this argument
to the absolute extreme, one could state that "you don't need a compiler or
high level language, you can just write your code in assembly." I am of course
not making any attempt to draw a false equivalence between your suggestion and
that absurd example. I am simply illustrating the point that not every way of
achieving a goal is equivalent in terms of skill and effort required to achieve
it.
I am sorry to digress into a philosophical discussion in this post, but I feel
like our discussion is not converging as we are making somewhat orthogonal
arguments.
So can we please discuss the way forward based on whether we feel this
usability enhancement is desirable and whether its benefits outweigh the cost
of providing it. What is not at all clear to me is what you view as the cost of
providing this convenience. And to a lesser extent whether you feel that a
familiar interface such as a builtin would at all be preferrable to any user.
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/85091
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