Re: A FrontEnd in C++?

[Chris Lattner <sabre at nondot dot org>]

> Go right ahead.  All you need is a new branch and some free time.  I
> would personally suggest following some of the design and implementation
> ideas from SUIF and/or Sage++.  They are kind of neat.

As long as we are plugging compiler infrastructures, I thought I might
mention my own project LLVM: http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/

It's also completely written in C++ (G++ 3.2), uses a GCC->LLVM frontend,
is SSA based, open-source, and has some interesting technology available
in it.  The LLVM instruction set is roughly equivalent to SIMPLE
(http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/LangRef.html).

A few of the nify things LLVM provides are the modular pass system:
http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/docs/WritingAnLLVMPass.html
strong infrastructure for interprocedural optimizations, linktime, and
runtime optimizations, etc.  The infrastructure is _very_ fast.

Additionally, because it uses C++ and the STL throughout, writing
transformations is quite simple.  For example, LICM and GCSE are each
just a couple hundred lines of code (which are mostly comments):

http://llvm/doxygen/LICM_8cpp-source.html
http://llvm/doxygen/GCSE_8cpp-source.html

If you have any questions about LLVM or would like to discuss compiler
architecture, I'd be more than happy to participate.

-Chris