Hi,
we're currently developing an experimental back-end for a very
irregular DSP architecture violating very basic assumptions of the
gcc back-end. In order to have the option to switch the front-end
for experimental reasons and to have a clear interface to gcc, we
chose to decouple the back-end and use XML as an intermediate language.
I just finished an initial implementation for XML tree dumps for the
4.1 branch that preserves the internal tree structure quite well and
might be of general interest. The patch itself and a small sample
are available at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/cd/ebner/xmldump
Given the strong tool support for XML and XSL, this might serve as an
excellent debugging utility. Furthermore, it might be useful to other
tools relying on the semantics of programs.
The intention of this posting is to ask for suggestions and to see if
it is of interest to integrate a dump format like this in gcc. The
representation is not yet as compact as I'd like to have it and the
current implementation ignores annotations such as alias information.
However, the intention should be clear.
Cheers,
-
Dietmar
PS: I didn't find a way to have manually malloc'ed memory point to
garbage collected trees, so I put my whole data structure under
ggc control. I would be grateful if somebody wants to have a look
at it since I'm not fully convinced of the correctness of my
implementation - although it seems to work.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dietmar Ebner
CD Laboratory - Compilation Techniques for Embedded Processors
Institut fuer Computersprachen E: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Technische Universitaet Wien T: (+431) 58801-18598
Argentinierstrasse 8 / E1851 F: (+431) 58801-58521
1040 Wien, Austria W: www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/cd/ebner
