llvm dev - Sep 2010 - [LLVMdev] LLVMdev Digest, Vol 75, Issue 36

hmmm, that reply seems to miss the point, C is an "ok" language for  
writing OSs in,
but a terrible language to write compilers in,  C++ with STL is a  
much better choice
for writing compilers (hence why I for one have switched from doing  
compiler work
in GCC to doing it in LLVM). I would recommend abandoning the C  
interface for
LLVM, you're only helping people do lesser quality work than they  
could do otherwise.
There was a time when C++/STL wasn't mature and not everywhere  
available, and you
would have more stability using plain C, but that time has long since  
past.

best,
Peter Lawrence. San Jose, CA.


>
> I don't see why not.
> C is a worthy language, one that I think we should fully support.
> And by just providing some minor features really limits its  
> usefulness.
> Right now, at this very instance it isn't usable. Except as a  
> stepping stone to the bigger framework.
>
> But thats just my 2 cents.
>
> - Filip
>
> On 16 Sep 2010, at 19:51, Eric Christopher wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 16, 2010, at 5:35 AM, F van der Meeren wrote:
>>
>> *shrug* One of the things about the C API is that it's a
"support
>> forever" sort
>> of thing.  Is this kind of thing a big enough use case that we  
>> want to have
>> an API specifically for it?
>>
>> -eric
>>
>

On Sep 17, 2010, at 8:01 PM, Peter Lawrence wrote:
> hmmm, that reply seems to miss the point, C is an "ok" language
for
> writing OSs in, but a terrible language to write compilers in,
As I understand it, there are two goals of the C API, neither of which is
allow people to write compilers specifically in C.  The first is to provide
a stable, forward-binary-compatible API, which might as well be written
in C since it shouldn't encode any structure layout at all;  the guarantee
of
eternal support is why we don't add new features to this API lightly.
The second is to support bindings to other languages, which are far
more likely to have a FFI to C than they are to C++.

John.