Testers required for tool for LDC - asm_parse

[Cecil Ward]

I have written a tool that transforms a GDC-style (advanced-type 
?) inline asm fragment of D, an "asm { }" statement, into a form 
that LDC can understand even when it contains named variables in 
the asm.

This could either be used with LDC to transform your advanced 
friendly asm so LDC will accept it, or if anyone is really 
interested I suppose that it could be integrated into LDC if 
desired, as that would save the LDC developers some work.

It’s a hand-written recursive descent parser for a partial D 
grammar, only the minimal bits that are necessary to get the job 
done and I’ll admit that it’s a bit of a hack and the code is 
still untidy.

It has only received minimal testing, and needs other test input, 
that is little asm statements’ text. It also needs ill-formed 
input, just to make sure that the parser doesn’t go into an 
infinite loop anywhere. It doesn’t do diagnostic error messages, 
intentionally omitted for several good reasons, if faced with 
syntactically incorrect ie. ill-formed input.

It is a single D file of about 80k, 2k loc. Internally it uses my 
‘likely’/‘unlikely’ technology taken from GCC to boost 
performance of conditional jumps. This may not work under LDC, 
hasn’t been tested enough, but not working means not giving the 
expected performance improvement, not that it will make the 
program’s functioning incorrect.