Dear Peter,
Thank you for your explanation, which I enjoyed very much.
With the proposed new GPC, we must write some Pascal code which hands over the "Pascal data structure in memory" to something which can produce an executable.
My guess is that this data structure is an abstract syntax tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree
If so, will you provide documentation on the AST format as part of Step 1, or will the Pascal code itself provide the documentation, or will you use some standard format?
Is the existing TREENODE output in GCC's AST format?
Until we have a back-end, I suppose the front-end must be compiled with the existing GPC binary. Is that right? But the back-end could also be written in Pascal and compiled the same way.
Realistically this can only be done by the "old guys" - Waldek, Frank, and/or myself.
I agree with that. It will cost less and happen sooner.
When you get the chance, please be more specific about your cost estimate for the front-end in Pascal. If it's $20k, we need forty people donating $500 or ten people donating $2k.
I'm looking at roughly 40 hours to re-write my code for FPC. So a donation of $500 to your cause would be money well spent. A donation of $2000 I would have to think about more carefully.
What about the back end? Please estimate how long it would take you to make a C++ back end. I could write a back-end for LLVM IR, I suppose, but I'm not in a position to estimate how many hours it will take me.
Yours, Kevan