[llvm-dev] Splitting up Type.h: Good idea, bad idea?

[Reid Kleckner via llvm-dev]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 11:35 AM Chris Lattner <clattner at nondot.org> wrote:

> +cfe-dev.
>

Sorry about it going to llvm-dev. I typed cfe-dev<enter> into the To: box
and got llvm-dev.


> Splitting this header up makes sense to me.  Types.h was not intended to
> be the 7000 line monster it is now :-).
>
> Splitting QualType out to its own header makes a lot of sense to me, but
> would it make sense to further split it up somehow?  For example, one could
> split the C-like types, from the C++-like types, from the extensions.  I’m
> not sure if that would be useful though.
>

I think that's a good idea. I think there are some key types that everyone
uses (ReferenceType, PointerType, FunctionType). The Decl and Stmt class
hierarchy currently often use these types from inline methods.

On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 10:34 AM John McCall <rjmccall at apple.com> wrote:

> How many translation units actually don’t ultimately need the type
> definitions?  Because this achieves nothing if almost every translation
> unit ends up including Type.h anyway.


It's hard to know this without doing it. My plan was to do it, hope to get
early good results, and use that to motivate finishing the project. But, my
lack of results is making me reconsider the whole project.

The IWYU tool exists, but the results are generally considered unusable. We
could try to run it on the codebase and see how often it thinks Type.h
should be included. Part of the project is refactoring the code to not use
Type.h.
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