John L. Ries wrote:
Then we need to figure out how to make the syncing of GPC with the GCC back end take much less of Frank's time (or anyone else who might serve as lead developer). Any ideas?
Ideally you will find a new maintainer or better still, more than one. The question is, where to look for potential recruits?!
At our Modula-2 project we have received lots of interest from students at universities where Modula-2 is still being taught. Some are new graduates who have been involved in compiler implementations of Modula-2 or Oberon subsets either as part of their course-work or in their graduation projects.
It seems GPC has a good following in adademia and there should still be universities who teach Pascal. So my recommendation would be to actively seek out those universities, talk to the professors who run the courses and try to win them over as "recruiters". They could suggest GPC related course-work. They could tell their compiler construction classes that a new generation of maintainers is needed for GPC. To me it seems that this is the most likely way to find new maintainers for your project.
I also would like to comment on the notion that the GPC front-end is stuck with C as an implementation language simply because GCC is C based.
The GNU Modula-2 GCC front end is written in Modula-2. There is still some C involved at the bootrap stage (via p2c) but by and large GM2 is a Modula-2 code base. Check out the GM2 repository and take a look. The code is well documented and if you run into difficulties doing the same for GPC I am sure Gaius Mulley (the GM2 developer) will be happy to give you some guidance.
Ideally, we'd want the syncing with new versions of GCC to be close to automatic, but it sounds like that's not feasible in the short term.
Never say never, but I seriously doubt that this will become feasible in the foreseeable future. There is a noticeable influence of design-by-license in the GCC architecture. Making it easy to plug a front-end into GCC is not only not a top priority for the GCC developers but an outspoken group amongst them actually considers it undesirable because they see it as making it easy to circumvent the GPL.
There was a long discussion about the pro and contra of plug-ins some time last year (or even earlier) on the GCC developer mailing list. A great number of commenters actually suggested that the API should regularly be changed at random to break anyone's code on purpose. Some of these suggestions were to randomly change the order of function parameters. There is of course no technical merit whatsoever in doing that. To those who argue this way technical merit takes a back seat. Not all the GCC developers think this way, but this kind of thinking has nevertheless had an impact on the GCC architecture over the years.
It can reasonably be expected that competition with LLVM will cause this influence to weaken and the influence of technical merit to strengthen, but I seriously doubt that design-by-license will ever completely disappear from the GCC project.