Re: Ada files now checked in

[Kevin Handy <kth at srv dot net>]

"Joseph S. Myers" wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Kevin Handy wrote:
> 
> > Is this ADA discussion about bootstraping going to be duplicated when
> > the pascal front-end is checked in (is it written in pascal)?
> > If so, a more general approach may be needed to simplify bringing
> > everything up on a new machine.
> 
> The Pascal front end is written in C.  The Modula-2 front end is written
> in Modula-2 but includes a bootstrap procedure.  The Modula-3 front end is
> written in Modula-3, but I don't know that anyone has any hope of
> resolving the copyright and licensing issues to get it included in GCC
> anyway.  The Mercury front end is written in Mercury (but can generate C
> from Mercury; and I think only a few small parts of it were intended to go
> in the GCC CVS).  I think the Fortran 95 front end is written in C.  The
> COBOL front end web pages indicate an intention for most of that front end
> to be written in COBOL.

I've noticed a lot of messages about bootstrapping the ADA front end
that talk about needing to use the "correct" version to do the
bootstrap,
which is one reason I proposed some type of bytecode engine. Since you
supply the pre-compiled bytecode version, it should just work. Ignore
whatever version the user has installed (which may be broken, the wrong
version, or not be installed properly), and use one you know will work,
because you put it there and tested it.

It does mean you would be shipping a big binary file (or two) and the 
source to the bytecode engine. I really don't know if the costs
would outweigh the benefits, but I thought a discussion might help
point to a workable solution.