Re: Progress on GCC plugins ?

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile@starynkevitch.net>]

Richard Kenner wrote:
> 
> As was said before, the difficultly in people working with GCC is
> primarily lack of adequate documentation.  

I am not sure of that.

GCC is a huge piece of software. This is the major difficulty: grasping 
a 3MLOC software whose source is available, rather well commented, with 
some documentation (I agree it could be better; feel free to add it at 
least on the wiki).

Compare this to the Linux kernel (which I do not know in detail). While 
it might be more documented in the source tree, it is certainly more 
documented outside (there are several good books on kernel internals; 
I'm not sure that equivalent books for GCC exist, and I would spend 50 
euros -of my own money- for such a book if it existed).

And still, diving and contributing to the Linux kernel and/or to GCC is 
really hard (I admit I don't know what is harder, and probably nobody 
knows both software in the same details!).

The biggest barrier to working on GCC is a learning & working effort 
barrier. I don't think documentation would help a lot (and maintaining 
it is a nightmare).

I am not sure (I really don't know) if more documentation on GCC exist, 
even inside companies with teams of a dozen of talented GCC 
contributors. I don't believe (maybe I am wrong) that for instance IBM 
or Google or AMD (or any company with several GCC developers full time) 
have a lot of (maybe proprietary) internal documentation on GCC.

I even don't believe that competitor proprietary compilers are much more 
documented than GCC.

GCC is an incredibly complex software (because any similar compiler has 
to be complex and huge).

PS. My mentor on GCC has been Sebastian Pop. I'll never thank him enough!

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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