Gentle ping.
Somehow I mixed dates and thought Stage 1 ends Thursday 27 November, but today I realized the deadline is actually in three days, Monday 17 November. Thanks! > 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
