Re: GCC + libJIT instead of LLVM

[Gabriele SVELTO <gabriele dot svelto at st dot com>]

Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote:
> I believe that Kiril mentioned in a separate post the equation
>    (mcs | csc | cscc) & gcc & libJIT == LLVM ?
>
> I tend to believe that Kiril dreams of building a CLI/.NET 
> infrastructure and VM which uses all the powerful optimisations of GCC.
>
> For reference to Kiril: do you know that there exist some branches of 
> GCC (I believe it was contributed by STMicro guys) which are able to
>  1. Parse (as a front-end) the CLI bytecode and generate the Gimple IR 
> from it
>  2. Parse C# (as a front-end) and generate the Gimple IR from it
>  3. Provide a backend which spills CLI bytecode from Gimple IR (without 
> using the backend infrastructure of GCC, but "replacing" it).
> Maybe these branches could satisfy some of Kiril dreams (which I still 
> did not understood exactly).

the CLI BE/FE branch (http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cli.html) has seen little 
progress lately mostly because we have been 'redirected' to another project but 
we're still trying to push it forward and we have recently applied a few patches 
that make it quite usable for compiling C code and running the resulting CLI 
binaries under Mono. We support emitting CLI from GIMPLE and using CLI as a 
source language (though the front-end hasn't been tested for a while now 
unfortunately). We haven't written a C# front-end though, but maybe somebody 
else tried. That would end up as something very different from what we've been 
doing in the CLI branch (i.e. something more like gcj).