While debugging the GCJ front-end, I have found debug_tree() to be an immensely useful tool. I hope dump_tree() proves similarly useful for GCJX.
By the way, I added a small page to the GCC Wiki describing how to go about debugging GCJX.
Digital Nirvana
Apple, Google and Microsoft want to liberate us from the tyranny of folders and file names. You would never have to remember the name of a file or the folder in which you put it in to retrieve it. In a way, this is already how a lot of us use the Internet - I for one, just Google for a page rather than bookmark it and try to locate it within my labyrinthine bookmarks folder. This is good and I appreciate it. However, unlike the World Wide Web, your desktop PC would some time run out of disc space. When that happens, you can either just buy another hard disc or try to clean your existing hard disc. If you choose the latter, how do you find stuff you do not want? These tools make it easy for you to find stuff you want but not what you do not want.
IBM has created a Universal Virtual Computer to solve the problem of digital decay. Does any one else think this is an overkill? Is using well-documented document or image formats with portable reference reader implementations not good enough? What is to stop subtle errors in porting the UVC to new platforms from preventing the documents to be displayed as originally intended?
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.
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!