GCC Needs a backend cleanup and complete rewrite

[Michael Matz]

Hi,

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Mo McKinlay wrote:
>
> Perhaps one way to do this would be (and this is a long shot) to have a
> 'bootstrap' compiler which is written to work on just about anything,

I already see it.  The bootstrap compiler written in portable /bin/sh code
(_not_ POSIX sh code, meaning no sh functions, "test" all over the place
and other strangenesses), nicely intertwined with M4 (may be GNU m4, to
make it a bit easier) outputs (for which the original M4 source got lost),
all packed into a unbelievable large script (say 300k lines).  The machine
descriptions are nicely readable M4 macros in autoconf style, recog is
replaced by mighty sed/awk/expr, optimization is based on pattern
matching, for what, how fortunate for, also sed can be used.  This
abomination on the face of earth then takes a year to bootstrap gcc on
current machines, but who cares, they will become faster.  And because we
want to support also Win32, we also have an, horrors over horrors,
sh->.BAT converter.

;-)


Ciao,
Michael.