Elena's Blog

The Montreal Tracing Workshop wiki is now publicly accessible.
This is the link:
https://ltt.polymtl.ca/tracingwiki/index.php/TracingSummit2008

Our team has made the first contribution to GCC last week.  This is
quite exciting news for us, and hopefully it will be the first of many
contributions to come.  Kris Van Hees has implemented UTF-16 and
UTF-32 char data types support for the C and C++ languages in gcc.

His work is based on the ISO/IEC draft technical report for C (ISO/IEC
JTC1 SC22 WG14 N1040) and the proposal for C++ (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21N2249)  here
Neither proposal defines a specific encoding for UTF-16. This
implementation uses the target endianness to determine whether
UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE will be used.

Support was added for the following wide character datatypes (internal
for C, Fundamental types for C++) with the given underlying data
types:

    * char16_t: short unsigned int
    * char32_t: unsigned int

Support was added to the tokenizer to accept the following new
character and string literal notations:

    * u'c-char-sequence' char16_t character literal (UTF-16)
    * U'c-char-sequence' char32_t character literal (UTF-32)
    * u"s-char-sequence" array of char16_t (UTF-16)
    * U"s-char-sequence" array of char32_t (UTF-32)

Support was also added to the C parser and the C++ parser to handle the
following concatenations of string literals:

    * "a" u"a" -> u"ab"
    * u"a" "b" -> u"ab"
    * u"a" u"b" -> u"ab"
    * "a" U"b" -> U"ab"
    * U"a" "b" -> U"ab"
    * U"a" U"b" -> U"ab"

This behaviour is only available in the gnu99, c++0x, and gnu++0x
compiler modes.

See the initial patch submitted upstream:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2007-11/msg00021.html
And the revisions:
    * http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-03/msg00827.html
    * http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-03/msg01474.html
    * http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-03/msg02025.html
    * http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-04/msg01235.html

The patch was commited to the GCC trunk on Apr 18th, 2008.
Thanks to Jason Merrill, Joseph Myers, Andrew Pinski and Tom Tromey for the reviews.

One other member of our team, Alison Holloway, has been writing interesting blog entries about Oracle VM. They have useful instructions about how to install OVM, and more to come in the near future. Do take a look at Alison's Blog.