I would be quite willing to work on such a project (in my spare time),
Excellent!
but I don't have the documentation to do a decent job of it. It seems to me that the best bet would be to match the language used by Borland's products for maximum compatibility.
Yes, of course - this goes without saying..
The latest version of Delphi that I have documentation for is ver6 and I don't have the cash to go out and buy ver8. (Remember when Turbo Pascal 3.0 cost $49?)
Well, I too have D6 on my Windows partition (plus Kylix 3 for Linux). Note that a recursive descend parser for D4-5 (partly 6) syntax is not that hard: http://sourceforge.net/projects/arkadios (A project of mine currently in sleeping mode)
The parser is based on Martin Waldenburg's Delphi parser but translated to C. However, the generics part on top is not worth to be kept, as it's dog slow and pre-pre beta. BTW: IIRC I did not translate the Lexer to C, but this should not be a problem.
Finally, translating the above source from C to C# should not be a problem at all.
If someone can provide a language spec, I would be willing to begin putting together a scanner/parser.
Shouldn't something like this be able to leverage the gmcs compiler internals for the IR and such?
We have four possiblities as I see it:
1.> Implement from scratch with some compiler generator
2.> Implement from scratch (based on the recursive descend parser from above)
3.> Fork from Free Pascal Compiler
4.> Take (g)mcs and make it understand Delphi
3.> has the nice benefit of the compiler being self-hosted (?) - I mean the source of the compiler itself would be in Pascal and a good unit test. Drawback: We need a Delphi.NET command line compiler for bootstrapping during the first time (Perhaps there's some free community version?) and we'll have to introduce significant modifications to the FPC code base.
4.> Maybe some of the (g)mcs developers can help us out here, explaining what would have to be done? But due to the differences between C# and Delphi chances are good that we have to modify the used IR.
BTW: Theoretically we could even mix languages ;-)
I guess we agree on a managed implementation..
Willi
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