Re: A possible super feature to add to gcc

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net>]

On Sun, 05 Dec 2010 14:30:40 -0600
Aspertame Man <AspertameMan@att.net> wrote:

> 
>  Back in the 1970's when we ran fortran on an IBM machine we had this
>  really powerful command called CALL FDUMP that if inserted into a
>  program would send the names and values of every variable, at the time
>  of its call, to a printer or file. In my opinion this was much more
>  useful at times than a symbolic debugger, in scientific number crunching
>  applications.
>  
>   If gcc does not have a similar function call I feel there would be
>  people using gcc in the scientific community that very well might
>  appreciate CALL FDUMP being resurrected. 

You probably are thinking of a new builtin or intrinsic function.
It could be interesting, but it probably is not of general interest to
the entire GCC community (which these days is quite conservative on the
language extensions it accept).

That could be an interesting project for a GCC plugin or a GCC MELT
(see www.gcc-melt.org or http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/MELT for more)
extension. Maybe your company could fund someone (perhaps starting with
a very good intern interested) to do such work. I would imagine that it
could take a few months (at least for a person not extremly familiar
with GCC internals). 

If you fund an intern to explore doing the work using GCC MELT, I would
be delighted to help him on the MELT specific.

Cheers.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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