Re: Introspector & Treecc (was: [DotGNU]Licence question about GNU and GCC)

[Norbert Bollow]

James Michael DuPont <address@hidden> wrote:

> Even more, Creating bi-directional gateway on the ast
> level by interfacing the treenodes from gcc into a
> treecc node structure. 

I like this idea very much... this would create lots of
interesting possibilities.

> Even more, adding in XML dumping and Perl interfaces
> on the tree level to both languages with a database
> representation for debugging!

Very cool.  Besides making it easier to hunt bugs in the
parsing and lexical analysis stages, with some good
graphical visualization tools, this could empower hackers
to quickly check whether the current optimizer does a
good job on the performance-critical parts of their code.
If enough hackers do that, we may soon afterwards see very
good progress on the optimizers front.

I hereby withdraw my initial skepticism of your plan.  I
am now convinced that the strategic benefits for Free
Software of having such tools available are so significant
that they definately outweigh the strategic risks that we
have discussed.

Greetings, Norbert.

-- 
A founder of the http://DotGNU.org project and Steering Committee member
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet   (near Zurich, Switzerland)
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