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Re: Writing a frontend to GCC
- To: "'gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org'" <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Subject: Re: Writing a frontend to GCC
- From: "S. Bosscher" <S dot Bosscher at student dot tudelft dot nl>
- Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 02:42:34 +0100
On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 at 10:02:27 -0000, Stephano Mariani wrote:
> I am testing an experimental language that I and a few colleagues have
> dsigned. We would rather write frontend to gcc rather than writing our >
own compiler from scratch, and were looking for any information you may > be
able to offer... perhaps someone has documented this. Please bear in > mind
that we have never written a compiler this complex before.
Have a look at
http://cobolforgcc.sourceforge.net/cobol_14.html
Was created January 24, 2001, but I think it is somewhat outdated already
(especially the subsection on memory management). It's a good starting point
though, because it also covers the basics of designing GCC front ends. If
someone knows a better document (i.e. updated) version of this document, I'd
like to have that too...
Grepping in source code of existing front ends is always a good idea. Also
have a look at tree.*.
>
> I would also like to write some language specific optimizations, is this
> very time consuming (I am not familiar with the internals of GCC)?
I don't know much about language specific optimizations, but I guess
if you want to do them on RTL, you'll reconsider (or else others will
probably make you reconsider :) You'd probably have to learn a lot more
about RTL, and understand the ins and outs of the GBE far better than what
you need to just write a front end.
Greetz
Steven Bosscher
s.bosscher@student.tudelft.nl