Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

LLVM's design looks very attractive, but for scientific computing Fortran is really important, and AFAICT, LLVM doesn't have an intermediate representation comparable to Gimple: LLIR seems to be at the level of the registers rather than the nice abstract Gimple, but perhaps I just haven't looked deep enough.

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#4

Post by zeograd » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

As much as I love GNU tools "universe", I feel that this ideological position of RMS regarding GCC future is hurting more libre software than it does good.

That's a bit saddening.

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#5

Post by jimrandomh » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

Just let GCC die already. Not only is LLVM free from this issue, it's technically superior across the board. The general replacement of GCC with LLVM in most applications appears sufficiently inevitable that investing more effort into GCC is wasteful.

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#6

Post by userbinator » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

Isn't GCC itself GPL with all the source available? IANAL, but AFAIK that means as long as you release your modifications under GPL too, it doesn't violate any license. Or are they saying that GCC doesn't actually use an AST somehow, which doesn't match at all with my (admittedly limited) knowledge of it?

I'm someone who has experience with what can be done in terms of extending/modifying software even without any source code, so my perspective on things like this are more like... "you have the source and an explicit license to modify it, and no intention of keeping your changes proprietary, so just do it!"

Either that or move to clang/LLVM, which I think would be better in the long term.

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#7

Post by jesuslop » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:14 PM UTC

Excuse me, but what's so wrong with the existence of a proprietary gcc backend?

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#8

Post by gumby » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

spork1 wrote: post #2

comparing emacs to xcode/idea made me lol

> comparing emacs to xcode/idea made me lol

Why did it? Emacs is a great development environment. It allows you to focus on the code and supports debugging right next to your code, same as an ide. It is an ide.

Emacs lacks some features of xcode/eclipse et al but in exchange it has power they lack. Why shouldn't it gain some of their features?

(I am assuming you loled because you considered emacs weaker. My apologies if I got the sense backwards).

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#9

Post by listic » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

    "misuse of GCC front ends"

While Stallman's intent is the opposite, this is sounds awfully like the kind of thinking of big companies that are so easy to hate, where one can "misuse" a binary by reverse-engineering it.

Re: Extracting the abstract syntax tree from GCC

#10

Post by wging » Mon, Jan 19, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

It was my understanding that people have already extended emacs in the usual way to do lots, using llvm or clang, and that this argument is only about trying to do things that can make it into emacs proper. Is that not right?