Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria

["Trevor Jenkins" <Trevor dot Jenkins at suneidesis dot com>]

On Wednesday, 26 April, 2000 21:55:12, Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
wrote:

>>>>>> "Geoff" == Geoff Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com> writes:
>
>     Geoff> To get the full benefit, someone also needs to do Chill
>     Geoff> (yuk).  Then all the obstack-based stuff can go away.
>
> Good point.
>
> Or, we have to decide that if nobody is willing to do the work, then
> it is time for the Chill front-end is not going to be maintained.  As
> I mentioned, I've seen little-to-no evidence of interest.

I'll play devil's advocate here; or should that be hell's-frozen-over
advocate? I believe there to be a very good reason for keeping the Chill
front-end maintained as part of gcc 3 and later. It provides a
reference/tutorial case of integrating a new language into the gcc
architecture.

For those of us experimenting with front-ends the "new language" can mean a
language with which we and others are not yet intimately familar. With most
of us I suspect this is certainly the case for Chill because we don't work
in the market arena where Chill is important.

There are probably two new languages to learn for any front-end implemetor:
the new source language and the gcc tree. So having a small example
front-end like Chill to examine would benefit us. It provides us a graded
example beyond the toy front-ends created for teaching purposes. That Chill
has a recursive descent parser is probably an asset too. (Can you tell I
used to work on Pascal compilers?)  A novice can forget about yacc/bison,
lex/flex considerations and see the tree for the wood.

I'd add a third new language and that is the acronym-filled language
here---took me a long while to figure out what "sjlj eh" meant. Eh! :-)

Let's consider keeping Chill as part of gcc. The corollary of retiring Chill
is for far more documentation on implementing front-ends. And we know how
much more work that involves than cutting code. ;-)

Regards, Trevor

British Sign Language is not inarticulate handwaving; it's a living
language. So recognise it now.

--

<>< Re: deemed!