Hello Steering Committee!
Back in January a WIP patch series incorporating an Algol 68 Front-End
[1] to GCC was sent to gcc-patches. Shortly after, in February, a
request to the Steering Committee was made to consider officially
accepting the Front-End in GCC, if perhaps a bit prematurely. The SC
decided to not merge the front-end at that time, the reasons for
rejection being a) a concern about the potential additional maintenance
and development burden of having the incipient front-end in a release of
GCC and b) a cost-benefit analysis that somehow resulted as
non-favorable towards Algol 68.
So we did no make it to GCC 15.
We were allowed, however, to use a branch in the GCC forge and to use
the project's wiki and other resources. This has allowed us to continue
working on the Front-End off-tree, completing the language support,
fixing many bugs, improving the integration, adding tests, writing the
user and internals manual and designing and implementing several GNU
extensions to the language.
The result of this work has been sent to gcc-patches as a series of 47
patches, the last iteration of which can be found at [2]. In this last
iteration all the patches touching any sort of common code were approved
by either a global reviewer or the corresponding area maintainer, of
course subjected to SC approval.
We have also added support for ga68 to other tools so we can have a
working complete environment environment. This includes autoconf,
automake, Emacs and compiler explorer. The compiler is also already
packaged by some distros, pulling from the off-tree branches we maintain
in the forge.
Finally, we have made an effort to try convey to the GCC hackers and
maintainers how this front-end is a serious project, how we really want
to use this language and use GCC to compile our programs, and how having
this front-end can benefit GCC as a whole. I believe the response has
been generally positive, but that is up for the SC to judge.
Stage 1 of GCC 16 is almost over, so hereby we are asking the SC to
please consider accepting the contribution of the front-end in its
current form, which hopefully this time will be considered mature enough
as to not be a burden once integrated.
There is still a lot of work to do and it is not our intention to nag
the committee nor the community with this; we could certainly stay
off-tree for more cycles, and we will do it if we have to, but we really
are eager to be in-tree as it would make implementing modules and other
advanced features, that are next in our TODO now that the support for
the core language has been completed, so much easier.
I of course offer my personal commitment to maintain the front-end
responsibly and timely, to the best of my limited abilities and even
more limited availability.
Thank you for considering!
[1] Front-end homepage:
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Algol68FrontEnd
[2] Version 4 of the patch series in gcc-patches:
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2025-October/698011.html
