> On the other hand there were Java and Python frontends on the GCC, and where > are they now? I think only Ada and Fortran frontends are really good GCC > citizens along side with C/C++/ObjC.
The main Modula-2 developer said at a 2016 GCC development conference that the developers' penchant for changing major subsystems makes things pretty hard on front end developers. The silver lining (his phrase) is "a cleaner front end." For Modula-2, where there really isn't much competition, where the language has stopped developing, and where the main developer is a guy who has spent his life implementing Modula-2 compilers, that probably isn't a problem. (Yet even now, after 20 years, it's still not part of GCC proper!) For Java, the open-source competition, the constant extension to the language, and the fact that other opportunities are available for the people who work on that sort of thing, probably spelled the end of the GCC effort. The GCJ developers said this explicitly, and I imagine that this is true of Python, especially with the Python2 -> Python3 revamp a decade ago.
