Re: GCC Needs a backend cleanup and complete rewrite

[Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay at gnu dot org>]

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Today, Phil Edwards (pedwards@disaster.jaj.com) wrote:

  > I would love to see this.  Maybe not in C++, but along the same lines.
  > One of the many difficulties in changing the implementation language is that
  > FSF requires GCC to be buildable on just about any machine that ever worked,
  > even if it only has a K&R compiler from the previous century.  (Okay, that
  > was a lame shot, sorry.)  We cannot assume the existence of a bootstrapping
  > C++/whatever compiler the same way as we can assume a C compiler.

Perhaps one way to do this would be (and this is a long shot) to have a
'bootstrap' compiler which is written to work on just about anything,
which is capable enough of building the an unoptimised gcc, which then
rebuilds itself, et al. Kind of how things are done now, but actually
separating the bootstrap compiler from gcc itself.

I have no idea how remotely (a) useful, or (b) plausible this would be,
but it was a thought that just came to me :)

It would, though, be nice if gcc's abstraction layer was well-defined and
well-documented enough that ``anybody'' could write a front end for their
favourite language, be it Java, BASIC, COBOL, C#, or whatever.

The same, of course, applies to the back-end, although things don't seem
to be such a problem on that front, considering the sheer number of
platforms that GCC can generate code for.

My 2p.

- -- 
Mo McKinlay                                               http://ekto.org
mmckinlay@gnu.org                             Your Internet. Your Portal.
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