Proposal for new organization of gcc

[Alexandre Oliva]

Richard Stallman writes:

>> In a perfect gcs, I'd be able to
>> download the gcs backend and the language front-end, build them with
>> the installed C compiler and install that, and I'm done.

>> I think that already works now.

>     I couldn't make it happen, but I can't say I've tried too hard.  All I
>     have to say is that it is not as easy as simply removing the back-end
>     and the C front-end directory from the source tree,

> I would have tried something simpler--just running Make with arguments
> that tell it not to build cc1.  If that doesn't work, can you try to
> find out why not?  It might be an easily corrected problem.

This won't work.  gcc needs cc1 in order to build libgcc.a, and a C++
compiler, for instance, must add some symbols to libgcc.a, so libgcc.a
must be built.  This clearly shows my point: the front-ends are not as
separate from the back-end as they should.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva@dcc.unicamp.br mailto:aoliva@acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil