On 10 September 2010 14:40, Richard Kenner <ken...@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote: > > But if this were done, then it would be trivial to have proprietary > front ends, back ends, and optimizers. So RMS never allowed any such > thing nor any scheme that resulted in having any file that could be > used for such a purpose.
As far as I know, you can currently plug GCC FEs to a proprietary LLVM middle-end using llvm-gcc. It is not a possibility but a reality (read the proceedings of the LLVM meetings). Just no one cares, because (a) the result is not publicly distributed (only internally or for research purposes) and (b) there is zero interest on contributing/integrating any code back to GCC from both sides. There are two issues, whether is possible technically to plug clang to GCC and whether is possible to create proprietary FEs to GCC. From Richard comments, the answer to the former is probably yes with perhaps less effort than Dragonegg. But that is not so important, because the answer to the latter is also yes right now by building a modified GCC (people have mentioned this in the lists). Cheers, Manuel.
