The GCC Summit was a
big success — lots of people there, lots of interesting papers and
discussions. The “statically typed trees” talk looked like an early
favorite to me, but objects-in-C sort of turns me off; in the end my
favorites were the keynote, the loop optimizer talk, and the
autovectorization talk.

While there I hacked gcj a bit to generate more explicit code for
instanceof and checkcast. It turns out,
though, that we really need to wait for the new GVN and VRP passes for
this to make sense, so I’m just pocketing that patch for the time
being.

I got to see and meet lots of cool folks there — it was like a
year’s worth of socializing crammed into 4 days.

I think the most surprising thing I heard was that they are
planning to migrate gdb to use C++. I still have a hard time
believing that, but Andrew Cagney himself said it…

gcjx

I also did a fair amount of hacking on gcjx. In particular, I
wrote a pretty good chunk of the code to lower from the internal model
to gcc’s tree representation. For those not following closely, gcc
has undergone some huge changes in the last few years. With the merge
of the tree-ssa branch, it has now become much, much easier to write a
gcc front end. I expect it to get even simpler in the future.
Hopefully this realization will filter out to the community and we’ll
see more experimentation in this area.