Hello All, Do you know about GCC plugins not listed in the wiki page http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/plugins
In general, who is working on some GCC plugins? I would imagine that there are some other plugins somewhere. I won't be surprised if Google had some internal, proprietary, GCC plugin (but I don't know, this is only a guess). I also would imagine that some few very big software projects and companies (i.e. coorporations with a more than one million line of code single software, rich enough and with a management capable of understanding the value of their specific GCC plugin) might have developed some internal plugins to speed up their development process. However, we did not hear anything like these. Is it because some organizations or persons are secretive regarding their GCC plugins work, or is it because the GCC plugin idea did not catch yet? It is indeed the case that there are important missing plugin hooks (as far as I understand, it is not yet possible to code a new GCC front-end for a new language as a plugin). I also think that very big major free software projects (e.g Gnome, Kde, the Linux kernel, ...) could benefit from their own dedicated GCC plugins. For some wishes of GCC plugins, see slides 10-19 of my presentation at http://2010.rmll.info/Extending-the-GCC-compiler-with-MELT-to-suit-your-needs.html It would be nice to hear about more people working on their GCC plugins, even if they are not able or willing to show their plugin code today. My understand of GCC licensing is that the GCC license don't permit to distribute proprietary software binaries compiled with the help of a proprietary GCC plugin. However, that does not prohibit using a GCC plugin for development purposes, and then compiling the proprietary software for production release without using any plugin. Of course, I do prefer that every GCC plugin would be public & GPLv3+, but I am too old or too cynical to believe it will always be the case. And I don't think at all that proprietary GCC plugins are a threat against GCC or free software: they will be to costly to maintain, and I believe that proprietary GCC plugins will in the long term be inclined to become free (because of the burden of maintaining them)... I am surprised by the lack of free (opensourced) GCC plugins so far. Maybe it is just because very few linux distributions are packaging gcc-4.5 today! Perhaps we have to wait a bit. When talking about GCC or MELT, I always introduce the idea of application- or project- specific GCC plugins. Cheers. -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faiencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mine, sont seulement les miennes} ***
