[savant-devel] branch merge imminent

[Dale E Martin]

I wanted to give everyone the heads-up that the plugin branch will be
merged with mainline later this week.

For those of you not familiar with the plugin branch, it is the result of
some work done by Andy More for his master's thesis.  Basically what it
does is separates "core" Savant functionality from the C++ code generator.
The code generator becomes part of TyVis and is compiled separately from
Savant.

Likewise end users will be able to write their backends as plugins that can
be dynamically linked to scram at runtime.  This has advantages in several
areas: it allows users greater selection of licensing for their Savant
backends, it makes the core code more concise by separating out the code
generator, and it makes the "official" AST interface very explicit.

While this transition is still underway (along with the rewrite of tyvis
that is still ongoing), the work is far enough along that we feel it is
time to bring it over to cvs head.

Anyone interested in this work should consult the tutorial that Andy wrote:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at cliftonlabs.com:/usr/local/cvsroot co
savant_plugin_tutorial

Note that extensions done in the old style will need to be updated for the
new backend architecture.  Feel free to ask on-list (or in private) if
you'd like more info about approaches for migrating.  Also, this version of
Savant fully commits us to g++ >= 3.0, as it makes use of multiple/virtual
inheritance in a way that will not work with older versions of g++.

Let me know if you have questions/concerns etc.

Thanks!
	Dale
-- 
Dale E. Martin, Clifton Labs, Inc.
Senior Computer Engineer
dmartin at cliftonlabs.com
http://www.cliftonlabs.com
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