Re: GCL as gcc front end?

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Camm Maguire wrote:
> 
> Greetings!  I've recently been appointed by RMS to maintain gcl, the
> official GNU Common Lisp.  I was wondering about the prospects of
> eventually including gcl as a supported front-end to the gcc suite of
> compilers.  After all, gcj is there, and it has garbage collection,
> and a runtime required (I think) too.  What would it take?  As a
> *very* long term goal, that is?

Although there are probably plenty of gotchas, on the plus side,
you might not need to do much more than take the C-generating
routines and set them up to generate the exact tree structure
that GCL's C output would have if it were being compiled with GCC.
Easy to validate that way, just dump the GCL->C->tree and the
GCL->tree versions and compare.

Later on, you might want to sneak in optimizations that are
difficult to express in C (otherwise why bother integrating
with GCC?), but you'll have a working compiler as the starting
point.

(A very sad state for Lisp to have fallen to, alas - my pre-GCC
career was writing Lisp compilers in Lisp, it would have been
shocking to think of doing it in C...)

Stan