Re: A FrontEnd in C++?

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 07:59:45PM +0200, Michael Matz wrote:
> > >
> > > It seems that many people are more sanguine about allowing front ends
> > > to be written in their own languages than I am.
> > 
> > Although note, that the initial posting wasn't about adding a new frontend
> > written in it's own language, but simply written in C++, for which we
> > already have a frontend.  This has not the usual bootstrap problems.
> > While this doesn't provide the same testing for the new language, the
> > maintenace burden of this approach is far less.  Yes we (or better the
> > developer of that frontend) would need to ensure that he's interfacing
> > correctly with the backend, but that can be done with a rather small C
> > part, like e.g. Ada does it.
> 
> No.  The intrinsic complexity burden I am talking about is exclusively
> a function of the number of different languages used in the source
> tree (ignoring runtime libraries).  It doesn't matter which bits are
> written in which languages.
Then, in the case of a frontend written in C++, the complexity burden 
would not increase, since libstdc++ and libsupc++ are already written in 
C++ (as are parts of libjava, etc).
 > 
> zw
> 
>