GDC/GCCSubmission

GDC

Since the initial submission of the D front-end to GCC, this aims to keep a record of the current status of both policy and technical review.

Patch Approval Status

Patch Number	Patch Version	Patch Description	Status
001	v1 v4	The front-end (DMD) language implementation and license.	Under Review (FSF approved for inclusion)
002	v2 v4	The front-end (GDC) implementation.	Approved (v4)
003	v2 v4	The front-end (GDC) changelogs.	Approved (v2)
004	v2 v4	The front-end (GDC) config, makefile, and manpages.	Approved After Fixes (v2)
005	v1 v4	GCC configuration file changes and documentation.	Assume Approved (v2)
006	v2 v4	Add D language support to GCC proper.	Assume Approved (v2)
007	v2 v4	Add D language support to GCC targets.	Approved After Fixes (v4)
008	v1 v4	D2 Testsuite tests.	Approved (v4)
009	v2 v4	D2 Testsuite Dejagnu files.	Approved (v4)
010	v4	GDC Testsuite files	Approved (v4)
011	v1 v4	The D runtime library and license.	Under Review (FSF approved for inclusion)
012	v2 v4	GCC builtins and runtime support (part of D runtime)	Assume Approved (v2)
013	v1 v4	The Phobos runtime library and license.	Under Review (FSF approved for inclusion)
014	v2 v4	Phobos config, makefiles, and testsuite.	Approved After Fixes (v4)

Change Requests Status

Change Request	Change Status	Change Notes
GCC steering committee approval of accepting the FE contribution and appointing a FE maintainer.	Done
Does this stuff get bound into GCC? The reason I ask is the files are under the Boost license with ownership by Digital Mars. While we often have a fair amount of leeway with runtime systems, we may not have the same kind of license/ownership leeway with things that are actually part of the compiler itself. Did the discussions between the FSF, Digital Mars and Walter touch in these issues at all? Have you received any guidance from the parties on this issue?	Done	Contacted Richard Stallman, there is no problem with including the DMD sources as-is (now copyright D Language Foundation). Same goes for the D runtime and Phobos libraries.
Create a GDC svn/git branch on GCC for platform integration testing.	Proposal	Requires approval of the SC.
GCC-specific files in D runtime (gcc.builtins, etc) should have the GCC Runtime Library Exception notice.	Done	GDC#493
There appear to be various GPLv2 notices with old FSF addresses. Where those are on source files (as opposed to generated files), they should be updated to the usual GPLv3+ notice for GCC.	Done	GDC#493, GDC#495
DMD front end has functions with names such as error, but no useful i18n will actually occur because GDC formats the messages with xvasprintf before passing to the common diagnostic code. The DMD front end should be disabled, to prevent exgettext from extracting and putting messages in gcc.pot that won't actually be translated.	Done	Add DMD sources to list of sources disabled for translation, GDC#499 Improve GDC diagnostic to use diagnostic_report_diagnostic() directly, GDC#497
Target::critsecsize should have its code belonging to the gcc/config/ configuration for each target as a target hook returning the required information, not in the D front end code.	Done	See list of changes required to implement. GDC#500 For the worst case (unsupported target), should set the target hook to default to returning a large enough buffer size, e.g: 64.
Note we recently allowed generation of the dependency files even in the case some errors. Please consider doing the same if it makes sense. See the Sept change to c_common_finish.	Suggestion	Haven't looked into it.
How important are the environment variables to the existing user base? We generally try to avoid changing much behavior based on environment variables. Can these be made command line options?	Done	DDOCFILE and D_IMPORT_PATH were undocumented and removed. GDC#619
You probably want to review the #ifdefs you've got in here to make sure they're not supposed to be checked via #if or runtime checks (there's only a half-dozen or so): STACK_GROWS_DOWNWARD, HAVE_LD_STATIC_DYNAMIC, HAVE_LD_STATIC_DYNAMIC, BIGGEST_FIELD_ALIGNMENT, ADJUST_FIELD_ALIGN, ENABLE_TREE_CHECKING.	Done	Checked, and all are legitimate apart from ENABLE_TREE_CHECKING. GDC#530
There are a couple of places that walk the AST in a quadratic fashion, these should be looked at and fixed.	Suggestion.	Bug report raised.

Other Maintenance Tasks

Change Request	Change Status	Change Notes
Create a dmd-cxx git branch on dlang/dmd to host GDC's forked C++ front end sources.	Done	Create a new branch based on dmd/2.068 Merge all changes during 2.069 development up until the switch-over. Merge or cherry-pick in backports that have been applied on the GDC branch.
Add gdc devs to MAINTAINERS.	Done.	Patch submitted for self.