Re: LLVM/GCC Integration Proposal

[Paul Brook <paul at codesourcery dot com>]

On Sunday 20 November 2005 00:49, Chris Lattner wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > On Saturday 19 November 2005 18:56, Chris Lattner wrote:
> >>> Only the Ada frontend seems to be in a state to maybe support direct
> >>> frontend IR to LLVM translation.
> >>
> >> Sure, also maybe Fortran?
> >
> > I wouldn't count on it...
>
> Can you explain what you mean?  The context above was speculating about
> the possibility of reducing dependency on the 'tree' data structure.  My
> impression was that Fortran used its own private IR (gfc_expr for example)
> that wasn't based on trees.  I thought that it converted to trees as its
> interface to the rest of GCC, in which case, it is quite possible for it
> to convert to LLVM directly instead.

I think converting the fortran front-end would be easier than writing a 
GENRIC->LLVM converter, but not by much. Making the fortran frontend generate 
LLVM instead of trees is a fair amount of work, but IMHO doable. Making it 
support LLVM *and* trees would be a lot more work, and probably not 
worthwhile.

I'm not sure I agree with the original statement. For C++ at least we already 
do a fair amount of conversion from "native" language trees to 
GENERIC/GIMPLE.

Paul