On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 01:56:47AM -0800, David Lanzendörfer wrote: > Hello Folks > You certainly know about aspect orientated programming. > http://www.aspectc.org/ > Is there any chance that this will ever be integrated into official gcc? > Would be cool to define aspect because it would make your code much smaller > and more readable. Additionally it comes in very handy if you wanna debug > something.
The following is just my opinion and others may disagree, but I don't think it's a good idea because I think that the costs would greatly outweigh the benefits. OK, let's assume that the Aspect C++ group contributes a beautifully engineered set of extensions to g++, meeting all the coding standards, done with great style and with a large regression test suite, properly legally assigned to the FSF. Great code, slap the GNU label on it and ship it, right? But then there's the issue that there is no rigorous specification (at the level of a draft ISO standard) for how the Aspect C++ features interact with all other C++ language features (templates, exceptions, rvalue references, the standard library, etc), and the fact that the user community is microscopic as compared to existing GCC-supported languages. Then there's the question of how long we would have a skilled maintainer. It's an academic project. It's a decade old and still around, but all the publications are from one research group, which might eventually move on to some other project. In the meantime, g++ developers who don't know Aspect C++ will face the problem that their checkins break a language that they don't understand. If, on the other hand, the language really catches on, to the point where part or all of Aspect C++ gets into future standards for ISO C++, this of course changes everything.
