[pooma-dev] AltView* classes

[Richard Guenther]

Jeffrey D. Oldham wrote:
> 
> James Crotinger wrote:
> 
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>> This tickled a neuron the other day, but I couldn't recall the details.
>>
>> The AltView classes were put in to reduce link times and sizes for 
>> large codes. The classes that have enums end up having a link-time 
>> cost, both in space and time. I believe this refactoring was done to 
>> reduce the cardinality of classes having the "sv" enum. My 
>> recollection is that this, and other similar "optimizations", had a 
>> pretty substantial impact on link-time for Blanca. Unless these are 
>> hurting something else, I would tend to leave them in.

It seems they are only used for return type creation which hinted me 
that it may have beed a compiler bug workaround (so does the CVS 
histroy).  As an optimization this looks worthless at it just adds 
classes to parse. No?


> The POOMA CVS repository history goes back to at least 1998 March.  For 
> example, see the log for src/Array/Array.h.  This log gives an entry for 
> AltView0 and AltView1Implementation:
> 
> revision 1.141
> date: 2001/05/25 17:42:48;  author: oldham;  state: Exp;  lines: +47 -6
> branches:  1.141.4;
> 2001-05-25  Jeffrey D. Oldham <oldham at codesourcery.com>
>     * Array/Array.h (View0): Modify initial comment to indicate
>     changes should also be made to AltView0.
>     (AltView0): New class to avoid explicit instantiation problems.

The same comment is above the classes in the source, but it's not very 
helpful in trying to figure out what these problems are/were.

It's in my tree now, so I won't forget about it at least until the next 
treediff to CVS.

Richard.