Re: Separating generated files?

Matthieu Moy wrote:

The project in question is a self-hosting compiler which compiles to C as an intermediary language. Providing the generated C files to users makes installation easy (it avoids the bootstrapping issue). So it's more 'severe' of an issue than just one of for example generating documentation files using a 3rd-party tool.

What may make matters worse, is that there are interdependencies between a number of hand-written C files and the generated files, so it's not always possible to use an older compiler version to reproduce the generated C files for a newer compiler; so if you want to merge newer compiler sources, you may also need the generated files, at least if you want that without fuss. So, there is always a need to somehow transmit the generated files too. I guess that this is easier than code the system in a way to always allow backwards compatibility (I haven't worked on the compiler itself yet, so this is a guess and may need confirmation).

Apart from that, I've found it useful (in another project, writing a document translator) to keep generated files in a VCS (Git) as well (I checked them into the *same* repository as the translator source, even if it felt ugly (for the previously mentioned reasons)), as then when I changed the translator, I could easily see where it had effect on the generated output. It can even serve as a debugging help kind of like a test suite does. This may be the case here, too (again, I'm guessing here).

How are other compiler projects which are bootstrapping via C dealing with this?

Christian.