Uphill

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 25 May 2015 18:34:24 +0200, Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> Yes, they do.  The key difference is that GCC doesn't require you to
> delve into it's backend, as a language implementer, you only need to
> think of how the code should be represented in it's tree language (ie:
> http://icps.u-strasbg.fr/~pop/gcc-ast.html) - Because of this, I never
> need to look at assembly dumps to understand what is going on, only tree
> dumps,
> which are handily outputted in a C-style format with
> -fdump-tree-original=stdout.

yet there are no well-documented samples for GCC, like "let's create a 
frontend for simple C-like language, step by step" (at least not in the 
distribution). there are none for DMD too, but DMD code can be read and 
understood enough to work with it. and reading GCC code is out of 
question, it's way too huge.

i once thinking about using GCC as backend for my experimental language, 
and ended writing my own codegen. it does awful job, spitting almost non-
optimised code, but it was at least maintainable. with GCC i never got 
far enough, it's too complex and poorly documented.

sure, that is not your fault, i'm simply trying to explain why there are 
almost no people working on GDC. it's just too hard. or it seems to be 
hard, but without good GCC documentation it's almost the same.
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