From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Martin v. Loewis" To: colin@field.medicine.adelaide.edu.au Cc: egcs@cygnus.com Subject: Re: Code Generation Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 23:58:00 -0000 Message-id: <199901030918.KAA00761@mira.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de> References: <19990103074421.28824.qmail@field.medicine.adelaide.edu.au> X-SW-Source: 1999-01n/msg00062.html > I think we're not agreed that including explicit functionality is > necessarily cleaner than including a functional reference. If there > were a number of different applications which might make exclusive > use of the compiler's information (and I'm guessing there are) then > it seems to me to be semantically cleaner to provide the hook, and > decouple the implementation. I use 'semantically clean' here to include 'generated code executes correctly'. This is a top requirement for compilers, and assembler macros certainly break that. If you fix that, you probably find that you can't do anything inside the macro except to call a function. > I wanted to float the idea of opening up the back-end to people like > me, who really +don't+ want to tinker with compilers, or distribute > compilers, but who need access to some of the metadata in the > compiler. I think the best way to do it, once and for all, is to > define an interface for the backend transfer of the metadata, and I > think the least intrusive way is as I've described. Well, go ahead. My other concern would be that the day you've implemented the macro generation, you find that a certain application that falls into the category 'access to compiler metadata' can't be implemented on top of your macros. Regards, Martin