Re: CIL back-end

[Roberto COSTA <roberto dot costa at st dot com>]

Diego Novillo wrote:
> Sebastian Pop wrote on 06/12/06 12:40:
>
>
> > This page has no discussion about a CIL backend.
>
> Note that I never said 'CIL'.  I specifically said 'bytecode
> representation'.  The work being done for LTO will have some points in
> common with an effort to build a CIL backend.
>
>
> > The document in which Mark has announced the LTO briefly mentions 
> > that CIL was not retained for dumping the IR, without giving an 
> > explicit reason, so I think that we need a clear position from the 
> > FSF whether such a backend is accepted to be part of GCC.
>
> Yes, that's true.  If anyone is interested in contributing a CIL
> backend, the FSF would have to approve it.  That's not a decision we can
> make in this list.

It looks like you don't assume such an approval as granted... may I ask 
you why?

To avoid misunderstandings, I want to make clear that the intent of my 
post is to propose a CIL back-end, not to suggest CIL as a bytecode 
internal representation for link-time optimizations, nor to use CIL to 
bump GCC internal representation and to circumvent GPL restrictions.
(Of course, if there are points in common between a CIL back-end and 
efforts to build a bytecode representation, it may interesting to share 
the infrastructure, or parts of it).

What I need is to produce highly optimized CIL from plain C code, 
nothing more, nothing less.
In this sense, such a CIL back-end looks to me not much different from 
Java back-end that, to the best of my knowledge, is already included in gjc.

Roberto