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

[Alexander Monakov <amonakov@ispras.ru>]

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.

Alexander