Re: [Vala] GSOC Idea: LLVM Backend?

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Luca Bruno <lethalman88 gmail com> 
wrote:
> Il 30/04/2013 02:15, Jim Nelson ha scritto:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684742
‘2’

My mistake, I meant this ternary bug:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599349
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543189
> This is not going to be fixed anytime soon due to the nature of C.

Then I advocate two approaches:

(a) Let someone else investigate this problem and see if some fresh 
thinking can come up with a reasonable solution.
(b) Modify the compiler to issue an error when the compiler cannot 
generate the proper or expected code.

Maybe this can't be "fixed" in the meaning of "make it work", but that 
doesn't mean there isn't a problem.  Yorba has been burned on this bug 
numerous times.

The third one may be fixed, but when compiling Vala programs there's 
still an unacceptable number of C warnings generated by gcc.  I know, 
I know, most of these are due to const issues and can't be fixed, but I 
honestly believe that a goal of Vala should be zero-warning C code 
generator.  If GSoC student could come in and reduce the warning count 
by 10%, that's a win for the community.

> > As a hint, don't look toward long standing bugs with lots of 
> > comments, probably those are hard bugs to be fixed due to the nature 
> > of C.
My advice is to *gravitate* toward those bugs, as that indicates they 
are affecting a lot of projects and change would have the greatest 
impact.  As with the bug discussed above, if there truly is no way to 
solve the bug due to C, then I vote for valac emitting some kind of 
warning rather than just let the code slide through and cause bugs in 
the resulting program.

-- Jim