[Opencxx-users] Towards templates support

[Grzegorz J. <ja...@he...>]

Hi,

I checked in new a revised code into 'jakacki_sandbox_frontend1' branch.
The changes/additions include:

    'occ2' --- shell script that uses libtool for all linking and
    compilation needs. This is an implementation of a solution that has
    been discussed long time ago. This script is my candidate for the
    main occ command-line interface point. (In fact occ2's iface tries
    to mimic occ's iface as closely as possible.) My plan is to migrate
    toward this solution and remove platform-specific lining/compilation
    code from driver.cc and driver2.cc (possibly leaving Windows support,
    since occ2 being a bash script will not work with vanila VC++).

    'occ2-test' --- shell script that tests functionality of 'occ2'.

    'tester2' --- new much much simpler test script. I decided that
    existing solution proved to be way overengineered. The new one
    has the same functionality but less code. It is also easier to
    add and/or disable testcases.

    --disable-gc configure options (this was suggested either on the list
    on in private e-mails)

    --enable-opt=[none,medium,high] configure option --- sets optimization
    level, default is medium (-O2 on gcc). Currently works for gcc only,
    all other compilers must go with default level. If you know how to
    specify other levels on your compiler, please add this knowledge to
    configure.in (this was suggested either on the list or in private
    e-mails)

    'make test' now runs 'make install' and runs tests against the installed
    headers and executables. This should solve a couple of problems with
    libtool linking, that Alex Tolmos hit on MacOS X. 'make tests' makes
    sure that ${prefix} is equal to ${builddir}/testbed, so that 'make test'
    does not install in e.g. system-wide directory.

    Source code is broken into smaller pieces, roughly one component
    per class or a set of a few tightly coupled classes (e.g. container
    and iterator).

    Some upward and superfluous dependencies have been removed (e.g.
    dependency of Ptree on ProgramString).

    Most of the items in a patch submitted by Marc Ordinas i Llopis have
    been applied.

    'MetaclassRegistry' singleton class that does not rely on static
    initialization has been introduced in place of 'opcxx_ListOfMetaclass'.

    'ErrorLog' abstract base has been introduced as universal error reporing
    mechanism along with hierarchy derived from (abstract) Msg class. This
    enables writting unit tests that capture error messages using mock
    implementation of ErrorLog. Standard implementation 'CerrErrorLog'
    prints the error messages to stderr. As interim solution the singleton
    object conforming to ErrorLog interface is accessible through
    namespace-level function 'TheErrorLog()'.

    Responsibility for stopping compilation in case of too many errors has
    been moved into ErrorLog, which can throw exception if it thinks it had
    too much.

    Foo-init.so now does not rely on static initialization of dlopened
    libraries (which does not work on all platforms). Metaclass has to
    be initialized explicitly and metaclass loading code does it
    no matter what the platform is.

    As many filenames changed (due to breakdown) and the CVS continuity has
    been lost anyway, I decided to do two things at once and move sources
    from 'src/' to 'opencxx/'. This makes it easier to install all the
    sources in ${includedir}/opencxx and at the same time use '#include
    <opencxx/...>' internally within OpenC++. Consequently it isolates
    OpenC++ from accidentally including a file that has the same name as
    OpenC++ component, but is located earlier in inclusion search path.

    For every blackbox testcase a corresponding testcase has been added
    to check the same functionality using compilation via dlopenable
    metaclass module.

The ultimate goals of the changes are:

  * moving platform-awarness from driver{,2}.cc to libtool

  * isolating parser, so that it can be tested independently from the
    rest of the system.

The latter goal has not been accomplished yet, see TODO for the list of
things that need to be done.

Independent testing of parser makes it easier to implement and test correct
tempalate parsing (e.g. 'x < 1 > (2)'), which is a step towards better
templates support. A nice side-effect is parser reusability.

I would very much appreciate any comments and/or criticism of the code in
'sandbox_jakacki_frontend1'. If there are no huge objections I will merge
it to MAIN.

The source code was tested with gcc-2.95 on Linux.

Best regards
Grzegorz

##################################################################
# Grzegorz Jakacki                       Huada Electronic Design #
# Senior Engineer, CAD Dept.              1 Gaojiayuan, Chaoyang #
# tel. +86-10-64365577 x2074               Beijing 100015, China #
# Copyright (C) 2003 Grzegorz Jakacki, HED. All Rights Reserved. #
##################################################################