Re: IR files and Linkable Executables

[Jeffrey A Law <law at cygnus dot com>]

  In message <38C70827.9E4EE0A@uclink4.berkeley.edu>you write:
  > I have two ideas for improvements for GCC. The first deals with machine
  > independant code. I know that the standard for machine independant
  > distribution is simply the source for the program. I would gather from
  > GCC's ability to compile for several platforms and archetectures that
  > there is a point where all of the code is in a format after the parser,
  > and before it is translated into machine language. If you could save the
  > code before it is fully translated, you would get several benifets
  > concerning distribution:
This is an issue that comes up from time to time and unfortunately FSF policy
would prevent us from including such changes into GCC.

Basically this kind of capability would make it possible for someone to write
a proprietary optimizer which read/wrote that IR which could then be fed
back into GCC for final translation into assembly code.

Even if the legal/political hurdles were removed, this is a lot more difficult
to do than you might think.  Think about all the code necessary to build up
argument lists, layout structures, etc etc.  All those kinds of decisions would
have to be deferred until the IR is read back in and translated into something
useful.  I'm sure there's a lot more gotchas, those were the first two that
immediately came to mind.

jeff
Sorry,
jeff