Demangler update?

Martin v. Loewis martin@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de
Thu Apr 13 23:32:00 GMT 2000


> I'm personally not convinced that dynamic loading support is necessary
> at all.  It seems like the wrong approach.  Rather than requiring
> dynamic loading, we should follow the Unix way: use a small program.
> It should be possible to write any demangler to filter the input
> stream, as c++filt does.  Then demangling symbols is simply a matter
> of running them through a program.  pipe/fork/exec is a standard fully
> portable Unix paradigm.  Dynamic loading adds no special capabilities
> here.

I'd take that a step further: Why is it that external extensibility is
needed at all?

AFAICT, the rationale is to allow binutils, in particular GNU ld, to
demangle Compaq C++ symbols. At least, that's how I understood

>> Compaq C++ depends on this patch.

Putting my Free Software hat on, I think this is not a good idea at
all. Why couldn't binutils support the Compaq C++ mangling directly,
just as it understands the HP aCC mangling?

To me, this sounds like Compaq does not want to share the algorithm
for demangling. Why should binutils support their C++ compiler, then?

Having a better selection of the demangling algorithm to chose, and
perhaps allowing simpler integration of other algorithms (on a source
code) level is a different matter - I'm all for it.

Regards,
Martin


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