On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Richard Biener <richard.guent...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 5:27 PM, Andrew MacLeod <amacl...@redhat.com> wrote: >> [ I foolishly sent this with the document as an attachment... hopefully it >> gets rejected and anyone interested can simply download the document from >> the wiki..] >> >> Over the past couple of months, I've slowly been putting together an action >> plan to help modernize GCC's source base. We've had various ideas put forth >> over the years, and a few of the more meritorious ones have been >> incorporated. My primary goal is to disentangle the front end from the >> middle/back ends, giving us better control over their data structures. >> >> The biggest challenge is having an executable plan which allows the source >> to be updated incrementally. Ie, we need a way to get from 'Here' to >> 'There' that does not impact ongoing normal activities, nor noticeably >> affect the performance of the compiler. This is a huge effort and it will >> require a large time commitment on my part to see it through. > > Sorry for following up on this old e-mail but it just occured to me that > the (unfinished) GIMPLE frontend would be a great place to bootstrap > the new and shiny GIMPLE data structures. > > Of course for it to work you need to translate that back to fat-and-old GIMPLE > and eventually finish the textual format dumping as well - not sure what > the state of the gimple frontend branch is.
Work on it stalled sometime last year. I'm not sure if I would mix the re-arch work with the GIMPLE FE work. The parser will take the most benefit out of the new structure, but I think it may be better to make the front end be a sub-branch of the re-architect work so we don't conflate the two. Some work will be independent, but it will be easier to maintain both branches if they are separate. I do like the idea of tying the GIMPLE front end to the re-arch branch, however. So, making it a sub-branch of re-arch is definitely a good idea. Diego.
