GCC Needs a backend cleanup and complete rewrite

[Jeff Sturm]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> If you want to reimplement GCC, I'd suggest using a strongly typed
> language with run-time type safety and garbage collection.  C++
> is not really very strongly typed, and lacks run-time type safety
> and garbage collection.  (Actually the current approach to GC in
> GCC works pretty well.  So maybe you could do without that.
> Having a builtin GC would simplify things a little bit, though.)

Some frontends might best be implemented in their own language.  For
example, the java frontend could share a good bit of code with its runtime
if it were implemented in java.

Having multilanguage APIs for the GCC backend might even help it to
stabilize a bit.

Jeff