Design Considerations of GIMPLE Front End

[Andrew Haley]

On 05/17/2010 09:15 PM, Sandeep Soni wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As part of GSoC 2010, I am developing a front end for GIMPLE.
> You can find the basic theme of the project at:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GimpleFrontEnd
> 
> One of the most important components in this GIMPLE Front End is to
> convert the GIMPLE tuples into text.
> How such a textual representation should be, will obviously dictate
> the design and complexity of the
> subsequent parsing component. So, as per Diego's suggestion, to have a
> view on some of the issues
> I have started this thread.
> 
> Following are some of the issues/questions that have come  up:
> 
> 1. What should be the format of representation of the GIMPLE tuples in text?
> 
>    Ideally, the textual representation should be satisfying two goals:
> Easy to parse and easy for a programmer
>    to write by hand.Considering this,what is the best way in which the
> GIMPLE tuples be represented.
> 
>    For example:
>    A textual GIMPLE tuple for the statement a=b+c can be like
>    <GIMPLE_ASSIGN<PLUS_EXPR,a,b,c>>  (As demonstrated by the internal
> manual also).
>    Is such a representation easy to parse?

S-expressions are easier to parse and more compact, and are consistent
with gcc's back end.  Also, there are editors that already know how to
edit and indent S-expressions.

Andrew.