Patch: delete treelang

[Tim Josling]

On Sat, 2008-03-08 at 09:58 -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "Tim" == Tim Josling <tejgcc@westnet.com.au> writes:

> Tim> I suspect that people who have worked on GCC full time for a number of
> Tim> years, and who have commit authority, can tend to forget the many
> Tim> obstacles that are in front of someone starting work on GCC,
> Tim> particularly on a front end.
> 
> I've also been through this.  And yes, it is very hard... GCC's
> internals have improved greatly in the past years, but there is still
> a long way to go.

I'm  not sure this is true, in terms of complexity, compilation speed,
quality of code produced, and the general experience for a front end
developer. I have been putting together a more detailed analysis of
these issues but now is not the time.

> I wonder whether you've considered writing your front end as a
> library.

The Lisp compilers do not realistically support running as a library so
this is not an option for me. Similar problems exist for hooking into
GCC from any high level language such as Ruby or Python. Using GCC in a
just in time compiler is also very difficult (see the paper from the GCC
summit 2007 on this topic). The GCC top end insists on being in charge
and so does the interpreter run-time. Partly this is a historical legacy
in that RMS did not want GCC exported as a library.

> Tom

Tim Josling