Re: Putting C++ code into gcc front end

[Geert Bosch <bosch at gnat dot com>]

On Friday, Mar 7, 2003, at 17:50 America/New_York, Geoff Keating wrote:
> > Every front end should have it's own representation, which should be
> > lowered to something common like GIMPLE that is simple, well-
> > documented, and yet expressive enough to be useful to everyone.  I
> > feel we can't make real progress any other way.  Imagine how
> > maintainable each front-end having its own high-level IR with real
> > distinct C structs and unions would be.
>
> Well... When I tried to imagine, I started thinking "and, yes, we
> could have completely different representations for exceptions and
> structures and references and function calls between the C, C++, Ada, 
> and Java frontends" which didn't sound quite so great.
>
> After all, another project which is also a good idea
> and not making much progress recently is to commonize
> more of the C and C++ frontends.
>
> Maybe a better solution would be to document what the
> tree structure is actually supposed to look like,
> and then try to ensure that?

Note that Ada already builds its own tree for a complete
translation unit. As last action the root of this tree is
passed to "Gigi", which is the code that converts the GNAT
trees to GCC trees. However, even though this glue code is
very local, it is quite complex, and separation still isn't
quite complete. A better documented back end / front end
interface would be a great step forward.

  -Geert