On Jun 16, 2006, at 1:41 PM, Dustin Laurence wrote:
I'm pretty sure this is stepping into deep quicksand
No, just hard work. It is only quicksand, if you start, but never finish.
The mechanism I might favor would be to handle all the fun inside the language front end. Objective-C does this for example for method calls and just passes the backend a normal C call with certain data, that calls into a run time library to do the heavy lifting. This way, you preserve the notion of the backend and all its semantics, this saves you from having to fight against them, but it does have limitations (no full and complete interoperability with C).
You can just add a language runtime library (well established idea) to handle the harder bits. The runtime library can be as complex as C ++'s or Ada's without any sense of violation of the model gcc uses.
If every language were going to have the feature, then, moving it down into the mid-end or back-end might make sense, but I don't think it does in this case.
I wouldn't start with pthreads I don't think.
