GNU Modula-2 status

[Gaius Mulley <gaius at glam dot ac dot uk>]

Hi,

  After reading the contribution section on the egcs web site I'm
reminded of the need to keep people informed as to progress of
projects..

Currently GNU Modula-2 is in the process of bootstrapping itself.
Although it is still unstable, it does manage to build its libraries,
compiles and links hello world. I guess hello world shouldn't be
dismissed so lightly as this covers unbounded arrays, StdIO, StrIO,
and interfacing to C (and indirect procedure calls).

[ Many thanks for the inbuilt's such as alloca and memcpy,
  inlining/unrolling them is great when n is a const! ]

Just in case you're curious GNU Modula-2 is written in Modula-2 and
C. The Modula-2 component is translated into C via Dave Gillespie's
p2c (GNU GPL as well). The resultant compiler, gm2, will build itself,
all libraries and hello world (as above).  But when this new compiler
gm2.2 is run it dumps core..

There is still plenty of work to do, but it is coming to life &
the goal of having a stable gm2 is within sights - IMHO.

I'm very interested in getting the GNU Modula-2 sources into the main
egcs source tree - if or when the egcs committee think this is
appropriate. I don't believe I've modified egcs code at all (apart
from rtl.c) which, on the version I'm using (egcs-20000103), I've
modified the fancy_abort function to point the finger of suspicion
towards GM2 not GCC :-)

I've signed the FSF assignment forms last year, including the
wonderful assignment future, posted them to rms and have received a
snail mail photocopy of the same forms as confirmation.

The GNU Modula-2 sources are currently held on:
floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk in cvs.

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk:/usr/src/cvs
cvs login
cvs -z9 checkout GM2

(password is 'gm2' and also note the capital 'GM2' after checkout).

Many thanks for all your efforts in making the egcs back-end produce
such good code whilst at the same time keeping the intermediate tree
interface clean,

Gaius
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Gaius Mulley       University of Glamorgan     gaius@glam.ac.uk