I wrote some time ago:
On Saturday 17 November 2012 09:12 PM, Uday Khedker wrote:
On Saturday 17 November 2012 08:34 PM, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 07:03:33AM -0500, Richard Kenner wrote:
First, C or C++ is not the best language to write a compiler in,
It is my strong opinion that the best language to write a compiler in is
the language that it is compiling (or the primary language in the case
of a multi-language compiler like GCC).
I tend to half agree with that, but GCC is not exactly coded in C (or
in C++). It has a lot of C code generators (gengtype, genautomata, and
all the other gen*) and the combined amount of generated (C or C++)
code in GCC is not insignificant.
In my humble opinion, glossing over this distinction has been a gross
mistake. Even for the folks trained in compiler technology, it becomes
very hard to understand GCC in the absence of a clear statement that GCC
is not a compiler but is a compiler generation framework. Calling it a
compiler collection is also misleading because it is far more than that.
I just want to clarify that in the above statement I agree with Basile's
observation and what I wrote takes the point further. Instead of
suggesting that Basile is glossing over the distinction, I want to say
that the GCC community seems to gloss over this distinction.
Uday.
