Russell Whitaker wrote:
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, E. Weddington wrote:
Russell Whitaker wrote:
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
Gerrit P. Haase wrote:
IMHO you would get more testers (users) automatically if GPC would be included into the GCC repository. And it would be much easier to contribtueif the code could be checked out via CVS and so there would be also a better chance to recruit more developers.
Indeed. If it were on a devel branch at GCC CVS, a certain number of us GCC hackers would work to integrate it and get the branch merged; as it is, it's really rather inconvient to do such integration work
For example, I'm working on cleaning up the icky Ada configury, not because I know anything about Ada, but because it's part of GCC and I don't like having ickinesses like that in GCC mainline.
In contrast, I actually do know something about Pascal.
Perhaps GPC could be integrated with GCC-3.3.6 which is scheduled for release April 30, 2005
As far as I know GPC compiles nicely with GCC-3.3.5 so the problems with the integration might be mostly political.
Why would the problems be mostly political? From what I can tell, isn't GPC under the GNU aegis, same as GCC? Or do you mean political issues with the two camps of developers? (which would make sense to me)
I suspect the first problem would be to convince Gabriel Dos Reis, et al, to change the status of 3.3.6 from "open for regression fixes only" to add "and GPC integration"
I suspect the barrier, in the past, has been that unusual things have to be done to the gcc core in order to handle such things as case insensitive identifiers with a specific case sensitive linkage form, debuggery and validation which includes range limits, modularization, native string formats, etc. However, if Ada is now successfully integrated most of these problems should have been solved, and the politics will be in merging how they were solved in gcc/ada and in gpc.
I am on the outside looking in and pontificating. I expect Frank Heckenbach, who has done the majority of work on gpc, will be unusually sensitive to change. He has almost certainly had to resort to various expedients, not necessarily clean, in the past. Consultation with the Ada integrators should certainly help.