In other news, look who's blogging! Now that Andrew and Tom are blogging, Bryce is the only one in the Red Hat GCJ Triumvirate who doesn't. Who wants to persuade him to blog?
By the way, Tom has become one of the Java front-end maintainers for GCC.
#include <string>
#include <map>
using namespace std;
int main( void)
{
map<string,string> foo;
return 0;
}
The example might look bogus, but consider this: you have been told that explicit template instantiations can some times considerably speed up your build process, not to mention save space used up by the object files, so you begin by creating an explicit instantiation file that you try to populate with template instantiations that are actually used by your program. You compile all other source files using "-fno-implicit-templates", but not the one special file. If you have not caught all template instantiations however, you will hit the monster of an error message that I sought to show per missing template instantiation. You are supposed to then figure out from these error messages which of the template instantiations you have missed out. Should anyone be surprised if you lose all hope at this point and just ditch the idea?
By the way, GCJ already gets the column numbers pretty wrong on almost all diagnostics, so it's not as if we lose much by losing EWFL nodes.
n Factor
I just found out that my blog (as well as those of many GCJ/Classpath hackers) is also being aggregated by n Factor besides Planet Classpath.
This can easily frustrate anyone wishing to fix some of these ICEs in the hopes of making GCJ better. For example, here I am discovering that many ICEs in the Jacks testsuite are because the body of an empty block ({}) or statement is not being wrapped in an EWFL for diagnostics about unreachable statements, finding that it is trivially fixed and then discovering that doing this creates a whole mess of new ICEs on other tests, which have to be individually addressed in this manner potentially creating yet other ICEs in other places, ad nauseum.
To quote Jeff Law (gcc/ChangeLog.tree-ssa), "Death to WFL nodes"!
I feel guilty and sad now because once upon a time I had resolved to fix some of these bugs but never actually got around to fixing them. I had studied the source code and had read several papers on bytecode verification, especially some of the excellent ones by Alessandro Coglio, but never implemented any of the techniques. Not good.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!