Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Engster]

Richard Stallman writes:
> I let this drop back in March -- please forgive me.
>
>   > Maybe that's the issue for GCC, but for Emacs the issue is to get detailed
>   > info out of GCC, which is a different problem.  My understanding is that
>   > you're opposed to GCC providing this useful info because that info would
>   > need to be complete enough to be usable as input to a proprietary
>   > compiler backend.
>
> My hope is that we can work out a kind of "detailed output" that is
> enough for what Emacs wants, but not enough for misuse of GCC front ends.

Anyone can write a GCC plugin that simply outputs the AST in some
form. It's not that hard. The plugin itself would have to export the
symbol 'plugin_is_GPL_compatible', but of course you can't control
what's done with the output. No on bothers with this though, because
everyone just uses libclang.

> I don't want to discuss the details on the list, because I think that
> would mean 50 messages of misunderstanding and tangents for each
> message that makes progress.  Instead, is there anyone here who would
> like to work on this in detail?

I'm already working on it.

-David