On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Greg Ward wrote:
- At the highest level, we should just be able to say "I know nothing, just give me a compiler object". This implies a factory function returning instances of concrete classes derived from an abstract CCompiler class. These compiler objects must know how to:
- compile .c -> .o (or local equivalent)
- compile multiple .c's to matching .o's
- be able to define/undefine preprocessor macros/tokens
- be able to supply preprocessor search directories
- link multiple .o's to static library (libfoo.a, or local equiv.)
- link multiple .o's to shared library (libfoo.so, or local equiv.)
- link multiple .o's to shared object (foo.so, or local equiv.)
- for all link steps:
- be able to supply explicit libraries (/foo/bar/libbaz.a)
- be able to supply implicit libraries (-lbaz)
- be able to supply search directories for implicit libraries
- do all this with timestamp-based dependency analysis (non-trivial because it requires analyzing header dependencies!)
On windows, it is sometimes needed to specify other files which aren't .c files, but .def files (possibly all can be done with command line options, but might as well build this in). I don't know how these should fit in...
add_include_dir (dir) add 'dir' to the list of directories that will be searched by the preprocessor for header files set_include_dir ([dirs]) reset the list of preprocessor search directories; 'dirs' should be a list or tuple of directory names; if not supplied, the list is cleared
Why not expose a list object and have the user modify it?
obj.includes.append(dir) obj.includes.insert(3, dir) obj.includes.extend(dir1, dir2)
add_lib (libname) add a library name to the list of implicit libraries ("-lfoo") to link with set_libs ([libnames]) reset the list of implicit libraries (or clear if 'libnames' not supplied) add_lib_dir (dir) add a directory to the list of library search directories ("-L/foo/bar/baz") used when we link set_lib_dirs ([dirs]) reset (or clear) the list of library search directorie
Idem.
Things to think about: should there be explicit support for "explicit libraries" (eg. where you put "/foo/bar/libbaz.a" on the command line instead of trusting "-lbaz" to figure it out)?
Yes. In general, I think it's not a bad idea to give control over the command line -- there are too many weird compilers out there with strange options, syntaxes, etc.
--david