> I believe there is a strong chicken & egg issue here. Ian is suggesting that > hooks should be added only when an existing plugin would need them, but I > believe that on the contrary plugins won't appear if they don't have a > sufficient set of hooks. People won't even bother to make plugins if they > feel the set of hooks is blantly unsufficient. [They will either > experiment on their own GCC branch, or avoid GCC entirely, for instance > using LLVM instead]. But working on one's branch is much more painful > than coding a plugin!
I don't see a chicken and egg problem. Your work on making the GC accessible to plugins is a good example why it is not :-) > I have a concrete example here: plugin-specific pragmas (see > PLUGIN_REGISTER_PRAGMA on http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/plugin%20hook for > details) > > I have two imaginary use cases here. Sorry, the point is precisely that they should be concrete :-) If you are actually coding a plugin and get to the stage "ok, now I need a new hook", please send a patch adding the hook and a description of what the plugin is trying to do. Cheers, -- Rafael Ávila de Espíndola
