On Wednesday, 16 November 2016 at 10:45:54 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
On 11/15/2016 07:05 PM, Stefan Koch wrote:
[...]
It's a compiler frontend.
Very good observation :P
I cannot see any other purposes then code-analysis and
code-transformation. Regarding Transformations I wanted to
write a good D transformation tool for years now.
With that approach you can also say that code analysis is
subset of code of code transformation (it transforms code to
list of warnings!) and thus that is the only purpose. I doubt
it is very useful definition :)
Language frontend as a library must allow any sort of reasoning
about source code that compiler can normally do. What library
user will do with that reasoning is not of ones concern - it
can be analysis or transpilation to another language or even
dumb AST pretty-printing. No matter, in the core one has to be
able to do `import dlang.frontend` and write own visiting code.
Point taken.
My plan does not include to change the modular structure of the
frontend.
It's more focused on improving perforance and ease-of-use of the
AST and AST-Visitors.
