Re: GCC Needs a backend cleanup and complete rewrite

[dewar at gnat dot com]

Geert said

<<Although we have thought many times about schemes to be able
to bootstrap from a system compiler, it turned out that in
practise there were very few problems doing cross-compiles,
or bootstrapping from a previous version. (We always guarantee
that version X can bootstrap version X+1.)
>>

I think one dynamic that has been helpful here is the net. Somone
somewhere has both a machine X (with an existing GNAT) and a 
machine Y (that they want GNAT on), and knows enough to build
the cross port and then contribute it back. Several ports have
appeared this way (BSD, DOS, Amiga, Nexstep etc).

What we are planning to do with GNAT is to setup an area on our
libre site (a site dedicated to free software, we host it from
ACTE, since libre is such a nice french word in this context :-)

This area will have the basic components (compiler and binder,
i.e. gnat1 and gnatbind executables) for all targets in binary
form, providing the minimum components needed to bootstrap GNAT
on any target. That way, you don't have to locate and download
(or understand) a complete binary release of GNAT to do a build
from sources, and the amount of stuff that needs to be downloaded
is greatly reduced.

Robert Dewar