On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Grigori Fursin <grigori.fur...@inria.fr> wrote: > Hi Basile et al, > >> My suggestion to ICI friends is : just propose quickly your needed plugin >> events, and make >> your ICI a GPLv3 plugin. >> When you can show that your ICI plugin to an *unmodified* gcc-4.5 brings >> some value, GCC >> people will perhaps start to >> listen and look inside. > > Just to mention that I am a bit confused because I actually don't expect to > have problems moving > ICI to the mainline unless we find some big bugs that can change GCC behavior > (but I really don't > think so). > We had many online and offline discussions to move ICI to the mainline GCC in > the last few years > with GCC > colleagues/maintainers. We just sadly got delayed at INRIA this summer due to > different reasons but > Joern > is now working with us for 2 months fully time to clean and test ICI and > submit patches as soon as > they are ready. > > It's true that we actually need a few hooks and Joern will communicate about > that shortly BUT these > hooks are > already used in real plugins for real performance tuning (in a way as current > hooks are used in > Dehydra > for real program analysis in several companies).
And I don't expect problems in adding hooks that ICI needs. I expect that ICI is a reason to improve GCCs pass manager - and I expect that we will improve GCCs pass manager not by simply adding hooks to it to "fix" it from inside plugins, but I expect that we'll get a more powerful pass manager _inside_ GCC. I also expect or at least hope that more parts of the compilation process get driven by the pass manager rather than by ad-hoc code gluing several phases of pass manager driven stages. Richard.
