[cfe-dev] alternate clang driver

[Douglas Gregor]

On Oct 20, 2011, at 3:00 PM, reed kotler wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> I'm not really trying to sell people on another tool.
> 
> It's there if someone else wants to use it.
> 
> I found the clang driver to be overly complex and it was slowing down my 
> development and to me it should have taken about 10 minutes to set up a 
> new port and instead it involved lots of study and doing lots of 
> hardcoding regarding specific directories to search and may other such 
> things in the compiler which I find fundamentally wrong.
> 
> With my driver, I could do new ones in no time and make simple install 
> scripts so it can be configured for specific users machine.


It often looks easier to hack up your own code for a specific case rather than generalizing existing code to incorporate the case you care about. But in my experience, it's rarely the right course of action. Inevitably, you end up solving the same problems that the existing code already handled, and spent more time re-inventing wheels than you would have spent in generalizing the wheels that work.

It would be awesome if it were easier to incorporate new ports into the Clang driver. We won't get there if everyone hacks up their own Python script instead.

	- Doug