On Wed, 11 Nov 2009, Basile STARYNKEVITCH wrote: > * Looking at other niche languages in the past having had a GCC front-end (D, > Mercury, perhaps some Modula, or Cobol, or Pascal, ...) it seems that most of > them are not accepted in the GCC trunk proper. As far as I understand, neither > gcc-4.4 nor the current trunk can be configured to accept D or Mercury (or any > else non-mainstream) langauge. So it seems that it is *extremely* difficult to > have an experimental language accepted inside GCC core. But I admit I might be
No, it's not difficult. The basic requirement is that the maintainers of the front end, or someone with the interest and ability to maintain a fork of it (as with gfortran originating based on g95), actually want to include it in GCC and do the development in the GCC context (and of course that the legal requirements are met regarding assignments). We last had discussions of Pascal integration in March 2005, and the others haven't even got to the point of someone expressing an interest in integrating it; and the basic requirement for any front end or back end to be integrated is that it gets submitted by someone willing to be a maintainer for it in GCC. If maintainers want to work in the GCC context and have their front ends become a full part of GCC on the same level and under the same rules as other front ends, I expect their front ends to be accepted, even those for fairly obscure languages (we had a CHILL front end for a while). I don't think any of those you mention have been rejected, just not submitted. -- Joseph S. Myers jos...@codesourcery.com
