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Re: C as target platform?
- From: dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)
- To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org, helmut dot zeisel at liwest dot at
- Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 06:22:36 -0400 (EDT)
- Subject: Re: C as target platform?
<<For bootstrapping (and maybe for the distribution) of GCC,
one could use the C-"compiled" version of GCC,
although the real source is written in some other language.
>>
That's one possibility, another is to generate canonical simple machine
code (e.g. a mips subset) and provide a simulator. We actually looked
into these possibilities closely early on in the GNAT project since we
were concerned about the bootstrap issue.
But in practice we found that using the cross-port approach worked just
fine for both us and many volunteers who generated cross-ports under
their own steam without any help from us (Nextstep, OpenBSD, FreeBSD,
Amiga, MS/DOS, are some of the ports that appeared this way).
In fact to port GNAT to a brand new architecture, the basic cross port is
a trivial part of the work, perhaps 5% or less. Ada is not C, and just getting
a non-tasking bootstrap without the tools and without the run-time library
(particularly the tasking support) is a trivially easy part of the porting
process for a new architecture in our experience.