Parse transformery (Was: Re: Calling internal functions - foo::bar() ?)

[Luke Gorrie]

Kostis Sagonas <kostis@REDACTED> writes:

> What my mail tried to express (and apparently it failed) was that for
> a Programming Language Implementation the choice of satisfying the
> occasional convenience of *some* users (no matter how important they
> are) vs. adding a construct that effectively prohibits optimization
> and thus penalizing *all* its user community should also be a no-brainer.

If you want a lot of real people to benefit from compiler
optimizations then please finish HiPE so that we can actually use it.
Lack of backtraces, memory leaks in code reloading, unclear limit on
volume of native code that can be loaded -- these are limitations
imposed for your convenience that prohibit actual use by most of the
user community. There's no use targeting idealized users who don't
really exist and "punishing" us poor fools who do.

On the other hand, if there really are people who never need to call
unexported functions, don't get into trouble when using a different
compiler for production vs. development, select exactly the right code
to native compile, and never have bugs that need live troubleshooting,
then please tell us who they are - they should be doing my job.

The rumour I heard is they're all programming in ML and Haskell :-(

-Luke (sad that Richard C. has moved on to new and exciting things and
       all my years of nagging him for HiPE backtraces were wasted :-)

.. IMHO.