Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Stephan T. Lavavej" <stl@caltech.edu>

    > [Ben Elliston]
    > > This should be a side goal of future GCC work: to develop it
    > > in a way that makes it easier for the uninitiated to hack on
    > > it.  This includes removing complicated cruft and generally
    > > trying to keep the code base small and as simple as possible.

    > How about writing gcc in Modern, Standard C++?  You could do away with your
    > crazy garbage-collected C (double ugh).

    > This inflammatory suggestion was brought to you by...

Adding to the mini-dog-pile-on-the-rabbit:  write in some vvhll (very,
very hll) that let's you write directly in graph and set notation and
then uses an ai program to generate an ml-family program that compiles
to the compiler.

Heck, if you didn't care about performance, writing it in mathematica
or some such would make many tasks a complete breeze --- so really,
it's just a question of how to optimize programs in such notation down
to a practical compiler.

I particularly like the idea of writing virtual passes and having
those partially evaluated to fold their composition into single
passes.   Give it 10 years --- GCC is dead :-)

-t