Compilers are commonly divided into "front-end" - concerned with the language
itself and its syntax, and "back end" - concerned with code-generation.
Sometimes back-ends are language independent as in the same compiler back-end
can be shared using front-ends for different languages (C and Pascal for
example).
The term "middle end" also comes up to mean the part that is neither front-end
nor back-end, specific. In our case there are numerous optimizations we do
inside Daffodil that are back-end independent. I suppose they're still
DFDL-specific, but as they're not specifically concerned with the
dialect/syntax of the DFDL language we distinguish them somewhat. These
operate on the same grammar objects as the backends, but do their work in a
backend-independent manner.
________________________________
From: Steinberger, Rick <rsteinber...@owlcyberdefense.com>
Sent: Monday, October 5, 2020 10:46 AM
To: dev@daffodil.apache.org <dev@daffodil.apache.org>
Subject: RE: Subproject names proposed for discussion
What does the notation 'backend' refer to?
-----Original Message-----
From: Interrante, John A (GE Research, US) <inter...@research.ge.com>
Sent: Monday, October 5, 2020 9:29 AM
To: dev@daffodil.apache.org
Subject: Subproject names proposed for discussion
Steve Lawrence and I would like to bring a topic to the dev list for discussion
since not everyone is paying attention to the review of my runtime2 push
request. Steve suggested, and I agree, that renaming some of the Daffodil
subprojects might make their meanings more obvious to newcomer devs. If we do
rename some subprojects after discussing it on this list, we will do it
immediately in its own pull request since mixing changes with renames makes it
difficult to see which changes are just renames instead of actual changes.
What do devs think about us renaming some subprojects like this?
rename daffodil-core to daffodil-schema-compiler
leave daffodil-lib alone
rename daffodil-runtime1 to daffodil-backend-parser-scala
rename daffodil-runtime1-unparser to daffodil-backend-unparser-scala
rename daffodil-runtime2 to daffodil-backend-generator-c
