On Monday, October 26, 2015, Ariel Arelovich via cfe-commits < cfe-commits@lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi: > > Where I'm working I've been asked to look into developing a C (by this I > mean C89 C standard) compiler a new processor architecture being created > inhouse. > > On looking at the options and brushing up on compiler theory, I came up > with Flex/Bison, Writing the compiler from scratch or use Clang. I liked > this option better because parsing and and analyzing c code to genereate > somthing intermediate, and do this from scratch, seemed like reinventing > the wheel (an incredibly complex wheel, at that). > > I've figured that if Clang, works with the standard compiler flow (that > I've seen everywhere), it takes a C program and transforms it until it gets > a intermediate language (which is machine independant). The Dragon Book, > even calls this the output of the compiler Front End. From what I've read > from the documentation This is what Clang is: a compiler front end. LLVM > does optimization and translation to opcodes of known architectures. Is > this correct? Or am I getting this wrong? > Correct. clang is just the front end for C-like languages. It will parse and analyze the code (generating the AST). The IR it generates is the LLVM IR. So, my question is: Would it be possible to use Clang in such a way that it > takes a C program and generates an intermediate language so that I can work > directly on that language to generate opcodes based on the architecture > that we are currently developing? > Yes. This is how clang already works. It sounds like you should be looking at LLVM, not clang since you are trying to support a new architecture, not a language feature. > > Thank you, for any answers. > > PD: I know my question might be very hard to answer as it is not very > specific. All I'm asking for, here, is a simple: "It could be done, start > reading about this and that" or "It will be next to impossible, just try > something else" (with a little explanation as to why, if that were > possible, please). > -- Saleem Abdulrasool compnerd (at) compnerd (dot) org
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