🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings.

My Honours project is to investigate native code generation for a
language called Napier88.  Previously, Napier88 has been compiled into
a "byte code" which was interpreted byte-by-byte by a run-time system.

I would like to use the "back end" of GNU CC to take some of the code
generation load: I want to convert an existing Napier88 compiler to
produce RTL, the internal register transfer language, and use the GCC
back end to convert this to assembly language.

However, the format of Napier88 objects in memory is quite complex, so
it would be very hard to produce RTL in the "C structural form" used
inside the compiler.  Instead, I will need to produce RTL in "textual
form" (as found in GCC's debugging dumps and machine description
files), and have GCC read that and continue from there.


So: I am looking for alterations to GCC that would let it "compile
from RTL."  Such extensions would need to parse textual RTL into
structural form in such a way that the remaining GCC passes could all
run happily.

Do such things exist?

I would be credibly grateful if anyone can tell me of any work that
has been done towards making GCC accept textual RTL as input.


Thank you for your time.

Sam Bushell
--
Sam Bushell					     jsam@cs.adelaide.edu.au

     Honours Computer Science, University of Adelaide, South Australia