Hello all,
I've been investigating the possibility of creating a MACHINE DESCRIPTION (aka BACK-END) for GCC to target PARROT. My thinking is this: If a satisfactory GCC back-end targeting PARROT is created -and- PARROT is efficient enough (which from reading the documentation thus far produced seems like it is an inevitable conclusion) then GCC could compile itself to PARROT byte-code giving PARROT (and the whole open source community) a PARROT self-host compiler which compiles multiple languages (C#, C++, C, Pascal, Objective-C, Java, etc, etc, etc) to the PARROT runtime.
Is a complete non-starter, or is this something which has possibilities? Please give your expert opinions.
While I think you may run into some issues (James pointed some out already) I also think it's worth looking at in some more depth anyway. It may be problematic for some languages, but GCC compiles a lot and I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be OK with, say, FORTRAN or java.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk