Mark Wotton wrote:
> Is C++ the only backend available?
> I'd really like to have a backend generating PicBasic, which is a  
> fairly standard Basic dialect for programming controllers that I  
> happen to have a compiler for... is there a low-level representation  
> of Felix that isn't totally reliant on C++? I'm interested mostly in  
> the synchronous -> asynchronous transformation.
>

We only do C++ at the moment, but it wouldn't be completely impossible 
to target something else. First off, felix's type system is quite 
generic. As you may know, it does not directly implement things like 
ints and strings, but wraps the C++ values. In order to make the 
standard library retargetable, we'd have to pull out all the c++ 
specific code, and replace it with the code that adapts it to another 
language. So say we were targetting llvm, instead of "pod type byte = 
'unsigned char';", we'd have "pod type byte = 'ubyte';". This would get 
far more complicated with our libraries, because we wrap a bunch of stl 
stuff, and so we'd have to implement our own string functions.

Then there's the actual backend/rtl. I don't have much experience with 
this, but it'd take a lot of re-architecting to get them to work with a 
different language. You'd have to deal with all of the fun 
memory-layout, garbage collection, and etc, and probably a whole bunch 
more things that I'm not aware of.

It certainly is a long-term goal of mine to make retargetting a lot 
easier, but it's going to take a while before we reach that point. We're 
happy to help out though if you want to try :)

> (Background: I'm doing some lighting programming, and writing my own  
> event loops and queues gets old fast.)

I'm a big fan of having a large standard library, so if you have 
anything you'd think would be useful, send it over :) Or, become a 
contributor and submit it yourself.

-e

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