Re: A possible new port

[Guy Laden <laden@math.tau.ac.il>]

Hi,

> How far along is the Intel code generator in the Linux port? Some of the code
> could be used by both ports. 

No code has been written yet.
My partner and I are both new to compilation and have spent alot of time
teaching ourselves the subject.
Michael's backend HOWTO came at just the right time (we now know enough
to understand most of whats written there ;-)) - we're at the stage
that some preliminary and experimental coding is scheduled for the coming
weeks, and the HOWTO document is just the framework we needed.
Michael - if you dont have any objections (and I seem to read
between the lines that you dont) I'd like to maintain and extend
the HOWTO document. Please Let me know if you'de rather maintain
the document yourself. Otherwise, I thought a www page, at
least while the document is be updated frequently, would be a better
distribution format. Ofcourse periodic posts to the mailing-list can be
sent.

> Any suggestions would be welcomed!
I'm assuming you meant suggestions for OOC related projects. Here goes...
I'm not sure what scheme is currently used in OOC for doing consistency checks,
but I'm guessing its based on a per symbol-file key.
Implementing the scheme described in R. Crelier's thesis would
greatly increase the granularity of the consistency checks.

Another possible idea is a generic interface for object-file generation.
This would enable easy re-targetting backends to different OS's.
We (the Linux team) will implement an ELF interface (which btw could
potentially be reused for IRIX/SOLARIS), however a generic interface would
enable easy ports of the i386 backend to Windows or V4 etc...
Other possibilites are generic register allocators or instruction schedulers.
However I dont have the experience to tell whether any of the above projects
are feasable. All of them would make backends simpler and faster to write.

Yet another possibility is a standard Oberon ADT library.

Regards,
Guy.