sparse
Posted Oct 25, 2006 23:00 UTC (Wed) by
nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to:
sparse by viro
Parent article:
FSF should separate GPLv3 changes (Linux.com)
The Stanford Checker is, as I understand it, no longer based on GCC.
And, yes, it *is* easier to hack on a project that contains a frontend for
the parsing part of (most of) one language than it is to hack on a
frontend for a multi-platform optimizing compiler. Of course it is. sparse
doesn't even *have* a middle end to speak of, let alone a back end, so
naturally the constraints are less extreme. (Also, it has many years' less
accumulated cruft.)
But there aren't any `games' being played in the GCC source to make it
harder to separate the front and back ends: on the contrary, the
separation is finally becoming vaguely complete, and the pushback against
RMS's stand against explicit .so-based frontend/backend separation has not
stopped for a long time (and won a recent victory, no less: RMS is
shifting on this). Even then, the age of the ports is a problem: there are
many backends for which nobody is quite sure why particular architectural
decisions were done anymore, nor whether they'd break if changed.
(The largest remaining barrier is all the implicit assumptions inside
reload about how the incoming RTL will be shaped, and the implicit
assumptions in all the ports about how to generate that RTL. It's unclear
which of those assumptions are critical, and which are accidents of
history.)
(Joe, feel free to correct me if I'm talking rubbish: I'm merely an
interested observer of the GCC development scene, really. I mean I've got
plenty of local patches to the tree but I've never dared submit them
because they're awful.)
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