Re: [PATCH] Kill -fdump-translation-unit

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com>]

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 08:51:22PM +0300, Alexander Monakov wrote:
> On Wed, 10 May 2017, Richard Biener wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 5:41 PM, Nathan Sidwell <nathan@acm.org> wrote:
> > > -fdump-translation-unit is an inscrutably opaque dump.  It turned out that
> > > most of the uses of the tree-dump header file was to indirectly get at
> > > dumpfile.h, and the dump_function entry point it had forwarded to a dumper
> > > in tree-cfg.c.  The gimple dumper would use its node dumper when asked for a
> > > raw dump, but that was about it.
> > >
> > > We have prettier printers now.  This patch nukes the tu dumper.  ok?
> > 
> > Ok if nobody objects within 24 hours.
> 
> There was a reasonable IMO objection on the IRC (sadly, I can't say the same
> about the responses that person received from Nathan).
> 
> A quick search indicates that people have published .tu parsers in Perl, JS
> (producing json), the person objecting on IRC apparently used Python, and I'm
> aware of another Python-based parser by Bruce Merry.
> 
> My takeaway from this is that people cared enough about this to build and
> publish parsers in their language of choice, and that apparently it is or was
> feature-rich enough for them to use.  Despite the format being undocumented and
> formally not supported.
> 
> The motivation put forward in the opening mail ("is an inscutably opaque dump")
> seems like a weak reason for removal.

Can it at least be taken out of -fdump-tree-all?  It is huge, often larger
than the sum of all the other dump files, and don't remember ever using it
for anything.  Instead of trying to write a parser for it and reconstructing
something you can then later analyze, isn't it better to just write a plugin
that can analyze it directly?

	Jakub