[cfe-dev] alternate clang driver

[Alek Paunov]

Hi Reed,

I am fully behind your line of thinking, but why not be even one step 
more "radical" than your first step:

XML (or JSON or YAML - some variant of tree with properties as text - 
never mind, once it is processable) + scripting language which transform 
the registry to tool invocation parameters.

This means just few lines of important scripting code which everyone can 
modify (in specific cases) and instant understanding of the required 
data model (because one look at the bundled XML/JSON variants per 
distribution will be enough for the (even average) developer to realize 
the actual requirements).

I am also long time Linux/Python user, but in my feelings, the best for 
CLang (because there are other aspects too) at the moment is LuaJIT.

Kind Regards,
Alek

On 21.10.2011 18:51, Reed Kotler wrote:
> On 10/21/2011 03:25 AM, David Chisnall wrote:
>> On 21 Oct 2011, at 10:30, Jean-Daniel Dupas wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure writing a new driver from scratch is better than trying to externalize the configuration in the current driver.
>>>
>>> Is there anybody currently working on the universal driver ( http://clang.llvm.org/UniversalDriver.html ) ?
>> No one's currently working on it (or, wasn't last week when I asked).  It's on my to-do list, but keeps getting pushed lower down by stuff I actually get paid for...
>>
>> David
>>
>> -- Sent from my brain
>>
> You will see that no matter how you do this, you will ultimately end up
> with an isomorphic solution to what I did.
>
> You could try and put all the configuration variables in an XML file.
>
> That will be like the data structures in my program but harder to
> understand when you want to configure things. You can't factor things
> then because it's just a big data file. If you do a lot of factoring,
> you won't be able to understand the file after a while without building
> some tool.
>
> There are often some tricky things for a given installation, target,
> etc. and it's easier to fix this in the driver script than rebuilding
> the front end.
>
> Dynamic scripting is more natural for handling installation issues than
> hard coding it in the compiler or even if you add reading some kind of
> external file.
>
> Right now lots of people have to touch code in the same files for the
> driver, always a bad omen and indicator of design flaws and source of bugs.
>
> What will happen is that over time, people will chip away at this
> problem and in the end you will have some half baked scripting language
> inside of the driver that does exactly the subset of python needed for
> my driver.
>
> Clang should be a C++/C front end and that's it.
>
> Let some natural scripting language worrying about gluing other pieces
> together.
>
> My 2c.
>
> Reed
>
>
>
>
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