Hey all I've been quietly spending the last years working on my python-front-end in the background. And over the last few years always been thinking that gcc could be simpler for front-end-developers. I am just going to post up this simple high-level proposal just to gauge the opinion of the gods that are GCC developers as i don't really want to start working on something in a certain way in vain.
1 - How about an _optional_ library for front-ends, and some generators: The library say libgcchelper could be optionally used in the front-end code so developers could have a simpler higher-level api (something akin to Kaleidoscope from llvm http://llvm.org/docs/tutorial/LangImpl3.html) to generate code ready for GCC. So over all it will be a high level IL which gets lowered to GENERIC then we call gcc middle-end as normal. It could also provide some generators to build a config.lang/lang.specs and your compiler driver and the necessary boiler-plate code like langhooks. This could work well so existing front-ends can use their code as usual and new front-ends could use the generates to get the boiler plate code done for them and then able to use GENERIC if they wish. But comes with the cost of extra code to maintain which probably won't get picked up. in the existing front-ends. --- 2- Another way to go is, implementing these generators and also adding more code to the existing GENERIC api to make things simpler and maybe some more error handling to GENERIC. By make things simpler i would mean making new constructs like: Function *F = Function::Create(FT, Function::ExternalLinkage, Name, TheModule); ... BasicBlock *BB = BasicBlock::Create(getGlobalContext(), "entry", TheFunction); Instead of the mountain of different ways you can make functions at the moment. I think what makes GENERIC is so confusing is BIND_EXPR's to implement blocks of code. As well as SUB/SUPER context's etc. Feels very abstract talking about code in this way without knowing the internals very well. Having a builder class like llvm to handle a lot of the complicated fiddly trickery pokery to get things working. But this is difficult because the tree api code is pretty much black magic to me most of the time. But in the end probably the ideal solution. I think with the move to c++ is probably going to get much simpler with time. --- This probably looks more like a brain dump but i think i want to work on making something better in gcc and i think i can do something here some opinions or discussion would be cool. --Phil
