[fpc-devel] Delphi smart-linking perspective ( Language change and implementation ... )

[Jonas Maebe]

On 31 May 2009, at 21:27, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> Yeah, I got it when I saw Jonas' reply. The IDE could list all visual
> components in forms in a file and hand it to the compiler. And a  
> "custom"
> list could allow additional streaming types (for users code)

Either the IDE has to be able to provide a list of all instantiated  
class types in a subtree of the inheritance tree, or it has to provide  
a list of class that certainly are not instantiated. I'm not sure how  
it could do either though, since a programmer could always instantiate  
stuff directly in his code (unless there are classes reserved for  
internal Lazarus use).

Simply a list of certainly instantiated types without any guarantees  
about other classes would not be useful. The wpo infrastructure can  
already extract that information from the source. Although it can only  
know that these types "may" be instantiated, knowing it for sure is  
not going to change the results of the analysis or generated code  
(since it has to be pessimistic).


Jonas