[llvm-dev] TableGen enhancements

[Chris Lattner via llvm-dev]

Instead of syntactic enhancements, I think it would be great to invest in the internal infrastructure in the implementation of TableGen.

People frequently complain about the quality of error messages in TableGen.  One big reason for this is that we don’t track source locations very well in the “tablegen AST”.  I think that fixing that would be a really nice step towards upgrading the individual diagnostics.

-Chris

> On Aug 29, 2020, at 12:41 PM, Paul C. Anagnostopoulos via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> Now that I've learned my way around TableGen just a bit, I'd like to solicit
> suggestions for improving and enhancing it.
> 
> Perhaps there are some lexical changes that could improve readability of .td
> files (e.g., I'm planning to enhance the lexer to allow an apostrophe as a
> digit group separator in integers, a la C++).
> 
> Perhaps there are some syntactic enhancements that would make .td files
> easier to read and write.
> 
> Perhaps there are common portions of .td files that can be factored out to
> reduce future duplications, as with Automaton.td and SearchableTable.td.
> 
> Perhaps there are common portions of TableGen backends that can be factored
> out to reduce future efforts, resulting in some general-purpose library
> methods.
> 
> Perhaps there are new features in TableGen that, coupled with enhanced or
> new C++ files, would open up possibilities for using TableGen in new areas
> of the target-independent code generator.
> 
> I don't know how much people have thought about this, but I'm interested in
> any ideas you may have.
> 
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