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Is GIMPLE stable?
- From: Mateus Carmo Martins de Freitas Barbosa <mateus dot carmo dot barbosa at usp dot br>
- To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:08:36 -0300
- Subject: Is GIMPLE stable?
There's an ongoing discussion on the rustc forum
(<https://users.rust-lang.org/t/call-for-help-implementing-an-independent-rust-frontend-for-gcc/32163>)
on implementing a GCC front-end for the Rust compiler, and the issue
of whether GIMPLE is stable was brought up. Namely, if a compiler
front-end were to output GIMPLE directly, how often (if at all) would
its codebase have to be changed to due to breaking changes from GCC?
I did find this reply
<https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2011-05/msg00313.html> which says:
>> ?^ It looks like GIMPLE is expected to change per version of gcc. Is there a time in >> the future when GIMPLE will be pretty stable?
>
> "Pretty stable" won't be enough, and I don't see us arriving there at
> the moment.
But this is fairly old (2011) so it seemed reasonable to ask if this
is still the case.