On Monday, 25 May 2015 at 22:27:10 UTC, ketmar wrote:
On Mon, 25 May 2015 18:34:24 +0200, Iain Buclaw via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
Yes, they do. The key difference is that GCC doesn't require
you to
delve into it's backend, as a language implementer, you only
need to
think of how the code should be represented in it's tree
language (ie:
http://icps.u-strasbg.fr/~pop/gcc-ast.html) - Because of this,
I never
need to look at assembly dumps to understand what is going on,
only tree
dumps,
which are handily outputted in a C-style format with
-fdump-tree-original=stdout.
yet there are no well-documented samples for GCC, like "let's
create a
frontend for simple C-like language, step by step" (at least
not in the
distribution). there are none for DMD too, but DMD code can be
read and
understood enough to work with it. and reading GCC code is out
of
question, it's way too huge.
i once thinking about using GCC as backend for my experimental
language,
and ended writing my own codegen. it does awful job, spitting
almost non-
optimised code, but it was at least maintainable. with GCC i
never got
far enough, it's too complex and poorly documented.
sure, that is not your fault, i'm simply trying to explain why
there are
almost no people working on GDC. it's just too hard. or it
seems to be
hard, but without good GCC documentation it's almost the same.
then contribute to LDC?