Looking for someone to do paid work on SH backend

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello,

the SH backend in GCC is currently in rather poor shape and could need some
overhaul and for that matter, I'm looking for an experienced GCC developer
who might be willing to fix some bugs in the backend for money.

I have started similar efforts in the past for the avr, m68k and vax backends,
back then using the platform Bountysource in order to convert those backends
from cc0 to MODE_CC with great success. All of these backends could be saved
from being removed from GCC due to this work.

Unfortunately, Bountysource went bankrupt, so we can't just put up bounties
there again to work on GCC. However, there are plenty alternatives such as
OpenCollective, Patreon and Algora.io and probably more.

There is also a larger homebrew community around the SuperH architecture, mainly
due to the Sega Dreamcast console. Popular projects are the KallistiOS [1] and
various game ports to the Dreamcast such as GTA3, Counterstrike and many more [2].

Chances are therefore not bad that we would be able to collect some funds to
motivate an experienced GCC developer to work on the SH backend. There is already
an ongoing discussion in one of the Dreamcast forums on this topic and several
people already said they'd be willing to support the effort [3].

Thus, I'm wondering now whether there is any GCC developer out there who would be
willing to fix some of the bugs in the SH backend for money. There are currently
194 bugs that can be associated with the SH backend [4].

While I don't expect it to be realistic to get all of these bugs fixed, the most
important bug to be fixed would be PR55212 [5] which concerns switching the backend
to the new register allocator LRA. We'd already moved a huge step forward if the
backend could be switched to LRA as one of the most common failures that we're
seeing downstream in distributions are register allocation failures such as the
one reported in PR81426 [6].

Would there be anyone willing to work on switching the SH backend to LRA while
being paid for it? And what would be their payment platform of choice?

Thanks,
Adrian

> [1] https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_homebrew_games
> [3] https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=106838
> [4]
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=SUSPENDED&bug_status=WAITING&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=VERIFIED&cf_known_to_fail_type=allwords&cf_known_to_work_type=allwords&f1=cf_gcctarget&f2=commenter&f3=reporter&j_top=OR&list_id=436831&o1=regexp&o2=allwordssubstr&o3=allwordssubstr&order=Last%20Changed&query_format=advanced&v1=sh.%2A
> [5] https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=55212
> [6] https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81426

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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