GCC Needs a backend cleanup and complete rewrite

[Fergus Henderson]

On 22-Feb-2001, Mo McKinlay <mmckinlay@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> It would, though, be nice if gcc's abstraction layer was well-defined and
> well-documented enough that ``anybody'' could write a front end for their
> favourite language, be it Java, BASIC, COBOL, C#, or whatever.

Well, it's certainly not perfect, but it *is* possible to write your
own front-end without *that* much difficulty.  The Mercury front-end
that I've implemented over the last three months is only about 7500
lines of new source (including about 20% blank lines and about 20%
comments -- less than 5000 lines of actual code), although of course
that was built starting from a point where we already had a Mercury
compiler that compiled to C.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: < http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh >  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.