On Tue, 2011-06-21 at 21:02 +0200, Basile Starynkevitch wrote: > On Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:33:20 -0400 > David Malcolm <dmalc...@redhat.com> wrote: > > It's still at the "experimental proof-of-concept stage"; expect crashes > > and tracebacks (I'm new to the insides of GCC, and I may have > > misunderstood things. I'm entirely ignoring the garbage collector, and > > I've also used a few entrypoints that aren't yet exposed in the plugin > > headers). > > > > It's already possible to use this to add additional compiler > > errors/warnings, e.g. domain-specific checks, or static analysis. > > > > One of my goals for this is to "teach" GCC about the common mistakes > > people make when writing extensions for CPython [1], but it could be > > used > > - e.g. to teach GCC about GTK's reference-counting semantics, > > - to check locking in the Linux kernel > > - to check signal-safety in APIs, etc > > - rapid prototyping > > > > For your information, MELT has the same goals, except that it does not > ignore the Gcc garbage collector (on the contrary, it is built above > it). > See http://gcc-melt.org/ for more, or download the MELT branch (or the > MELT plugin).
Thanks for the link. When I mentioned the garbage collector, I was merely trying to convey the early, buggy nature of my code. This is a bug that I need to fix, but not a fundamental design flaw (I hope!) I'm aware of MELT - as I understand it, it's a Lisp variant. Languages and runtimes are a sensitive topic. For myself, I'm very fond of Python and its syntax (and its community), and having that available for writing GCC extensions is very appealing to me. The CPython runtime may not be the fastest free software runtime, but it is flexible and easy to debug. Although I'm new to GCC development, I feel that the more languages that GCC can support for plugins and scripting, the better. There's already a JavaScript plugin, and I didn't want the Python fans to feel left out. [Plus I'm using this code to analyse python's .c code, so I selfishly hope that other python fans will want to help; by using python as the extension language I hope I'll be more likely to get more contributors]. Hope this makes sense Dave
