On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 01:30:19PM +0200, Ben Morgan wrote: > In a course at my university (Universität Würzburg, Germany) we have > created a 32-bit RISC CPU architecture -- the HaDesXI-CPU -- (in VHDL) > which we then play onto a FPGA (the Xilinx Spartan-3AN) to use. So far > if we want to do anything with it, we have to write the assembly code > ourselves. > > How much work would it be to write a HadesXI backend for GCC? > (The idea is to use this as a possible bachelor thesis.)
I am not familiar with back-ends -I'm more familiar with the middle-end-, and I am not very familiar with the German university system. I'm guessing that what you call a "bachelor thesis" is what is called today "License" in the French university system. My feeling is that understanding GCC and writing a small backend is a big lot of work for a student. (For a GCC expert, it is rumored that making a suboptimal backend for a new architecture is several months of work). So I would perhaps believe that making a new backend for GCC is a quite ambitious goal (perhaps too ambitious for a bachelor thesis, if your goal is mostly to make something usable, not only to learn a big lot of things). If you follow that route, you should first find out, amongst the many existing GCC back-ends, the architecture which seems similar to what your HaDesXI is. Notice that GCC has even back-ends for "fictious" architecture like Knuth's MMIX. To get a picture of GCC, you might be interested to have a glance at some slides under http://gcc-melt.org/ notably http://gcc-melt.org/GCC-MELT-HiPEAC2012.pdf which has many links to other material. Of course, you can find a lot of other material about GCC on Internet. (you might even want to play with GCC MELT to understand some of the basic internal representations of GCC) On the other hand, GCC offers you a very powerful back-end architecture. But GCC is complex, and significantly evolving! Regards. -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faiencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
