On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:30:44AM -0400, Diego Novillo wrote: > On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 11:18, Manuel López-Ibáñez > <lopeziba...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Otherwise, as Ian said in another topic [2]: "I have a different fear: > > that gcc will become increasing irrelevant". > > That's my impression, as well. It is true of just about every code > base, if it cannot attract new developers, it stagnates and eventually > whithers away. > > To attract new developers, GCC needs to modernize its internal > structure. I have some thoughts on that, but progress has been slow, > due mostly to resource constraints.
Would you mind expanding--even just a little bit--on what bits need modernizing? There's things like: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Speedup_areas and perhaps: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/general_backend_cleanup But neither of those really touches the middle-end, which is where I presume the grousing vis-a-vis GCC vs. LLVM is really generated from. Or it's the front-end support. I don't know. I know there are ugly parts still remaining in GCC. But my experience (extending/parameterizing an LLVM optimization pass, writing/modifying GCC middle-end optimization passes, some GCC backend hacking) suggests that the complexity is similar. I think concrete "I tried X and it sucked" or "these are the areas of suckage" would be helpful. -Nathan
