Joseph S. Myers wrote:
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.
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.
This is a very interesting information.
But I feel that as a community we can understand it as both a half-full or a
half-empty glass of wine.
On one hand, foreign languages implementors (of GCC based compilers for niche
languages)
did usually not make the effort to even ask their front-end to enter GCC. Maybe
they are too shy...
But perhaps, as a community, we could possibly have (involuntarily) frightenned
them.
And my feeling is that offering the small infrastructure to permit niche front-ends thru plugins (or something else)
could be percieved as an invitation to join our GCC community. [In contrast to some people, I don't see plugins as a
possibility of fragmenting the community; I see plugins as a way to attract more external people to GCC].
And the landscape did change w.r.t. RMS feelings about Objective C. My understanding is that Apple is more interested
today (end of 2009) in LLVM than in GCC. So I won't be surprised if in a couple of years most compilers on Apple systems
would be LLVM based (and no more GCC based). Of course, I know nothing about that, so I could be entirely wrong. (I
suppose that most north-american GCC people know a lot more Apple than I do; I only used to have a an Apple G4 laptop
several years ago, and it was a disappointing experience - the hardware broke after 13 months!).
BTW, I understood perhaps wrongly that Ian Taylor seems to believe that gccgo has not much future, and that most of the
software written in Go (the Google niche language) could be compiled by something which is not GCC based.
Again, I do believe that plugins will attract new people to GCC. And I also
believe it is a good thing.
Regards.
--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359
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*** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
