RE: New feature: -fdump-gimple-nodes (once more, with feeling)

[Robert Dubner <rdubner@symas.com>]

I have thought about a graphical representation more than once.  Heck, the
connections between nodes is one of the things I needed to know in the
first place.  And certainly the information necessary is all there in the
output I generate; I have drawn by hand pieces of the tree connections
many times.

But it doesn't seem to me to scale.

A candidate for the absolute minimally sized executable program one can
write in C and compile with GCC is

      void main(){}  /* I didn't say it would do anything *useful* */

The generic tree for that program has in excess of fifty nodes.

	#include <stdio.h>
      void main(){printf("hello, world\n");}

has in excess of 4,800 nodes because stdio.h was brought in.  Without a
plotter that draws on the sides of buildings or on football pitches (you'd
sit in the stands with binoculars to read the results), it's difficult for
me to envision how the graphical representation could be useful.  I don't
claim my imagination should be the limiting factor.  On the other hand, I
don't think the compiler should be generating that directly, anyway.

(I've managed to distract myself.  Now I want to build a wheeled robot
that wanders around a football pitch drawing with colored chalk dust.)

My current takeaway from these responses -- thank you so much!,
incidentally -- is that whatever utility I have created here would be
enhanced by JSON (one and a half "votes", so far) or YAML (half a vote)
output.

Once the tree were available in JSON, then separate utilities to take that
output and display it graphically would be straightforward.

Okay then.  I'll change the naming from "*gimple*" to "*generic*" as more
accurate, and I'll generate JSON in addition to the other two files.

Thanks again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dimitar Dimitrov <dimitar@dinux.eu> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2024 11:31
To: Robert Dubner <rdubner@symas.com>
Cc: 'GCC Mailing List' <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
Subject: Re: New feature: -fdump-gimple-nodes (once more, with feeling)

On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 01:46:11PM -0600, Robert Dubner wrote:
...
> An example of a complete dump is available at 
> https://www.dubner.com/main.nodes.html.  The C source code that 
> generated it is available at the end of 
> https://cobolworx.com/pages/dump-gimple-nodes.html
> 

Hyperlinked text is useful.  But I would love a graphical visualization
even more, e.g. via either Graphviz or Plantuml.

Regards,
Dimitar