[cfe-dev] alternate clang driver

[James Molloy]

Hi,

Seeing as everyone's putting in their 2cents, here's mine.

The problem is that the current Clang driver is not extensible enough, or easily extensible enough. One can argue that a driver doesn't belong in Clang - that's really arguing semantics because the Driver, while living under the clang tree is detached from the rest of Clang and invokes it as subprocesses.

My opinion is that the driver should be either:

  * Pure C++/TableGen with pretty much everything declaratively defined and just some C++ glue. OR
  * Pure C++, reads some sort of configuration file.

The latter allows for distros to more easily adapt Clang without (a) rebuilding it and (b) shoving patches to support their weird directory structure on us.

I do *not* think that launching an external scripting language is best for two reasons.

Firstly it is slower than pure C++. ("Oh but LuaJIT is fast!", "Oh but Python is fast!", "The driver time doesn't matter!" - it does. Clang has been built around build speed and to clobber all that effort because of laziness in the driver isn't an option IMHO. And interpreters, even LuaJIT, aren't that fast to boot).

Secondly because they create an extra dependency which is bad in and of itself IMHO but worse causes real difficulty in the bringup of new, native toolchains. You'd have to somehow cross-compile LuaJIT for your new architecture before you could run a hosted compiler. This is a terrible idea.

Reed, to argue that all solutions would be isomorphic to yours is the same as arguing that Python and C are both Turing-complete and so there is no difference in using one over the other.

Cheers,

James
________________________________________
From: cfe-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [cfe-dev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Alek Paunov [alex at declera.com]
Sent: 21 October 2011 20:46
To: Reed Kotler
Cc: cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: [cfe-dev] alternate clang driver

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
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>

_______________________________________________
cfe-dev mailing list
cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev


-- IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium.  Thank you.