Frank Heckenbach wrote:

since GPC development has mostly stalled, I've thought about if and how its development could be continued. Here are my current thoughts about it. Since the text is quite long, I put it on the web: http://fjf.gnu.de/gpc-future.html

Although I no longer use Pascal, I would like to make a plea for GNU Pascal to be sustained. Generating C (or even C++) as an alternative target is certainly a useful feature for any compiler to have but if GPC was to lose its interface to the GCC back-end, I wonder if it would still be GNU Pascal. I believe most people associate GCC back-end support with any compiler that carries the GNU moniker. Don't get me wrong, I am not a GNU fanboy nor a GCC zealot. I know that developing for the GCC back-end can be painful. Nevertheless, I believe it would be a loss for the Algol/Pascal family of languages and their users to see Pascal disappear from the list of supported languages in the GCC toolbox. It is correct that the existing code will remain available but without maintenance, GNU Pascal would eventually cease to work with the latest GCC distribution. GNU Modula-2 is now very close to its 1.0 release at which point it is expected to become part of the main GCC distribution. It would be sad to see Pascal leave the GCC party just as Modula-2 joins. It is not uncommon that a project maintainer burns out after a decade. Nobody can blame you for that. Perhaps somebody else can be found to take over the project and continue it. As for retargeting GNU Pascal, I personally would consider that a new project. How much sense it would make to reuse the GNU Pascal front end for a new compiler project to target a different back-end I am unable to say. However, I can comment on targeting the LLVM compiler infrastructure. First, some clarification. Some posters appear to be confused about what LLVM is. For example, I saw one commenter writing "I am not interested in programming in ... LLVM". The LLVM compiler infrastructure is not a programming language you would write programs in. Instead, it is a compiler-back end library that compiler developers can use to plug their compilers into thereby saving themselves the effort to write their own target specific back-ends and optimisers. Compared to using the GCC back-end, LLVM is far more straightforward. There are two ways to interface to it. You can either use the C or C++ bindings and generate your LLVM AST directly from within your own parser, or you could write a back-end for LLVM pseudo-assembly code which is actually far cleaner than C or C++. It is a typed virtual assembly language that has atomic intrinsics and trampolines and a lot of other useful things. I am currently involved in a Modula-2 compiler project that targets C and LLVM (via the LLVM pseudo-assembly language). We are using a template approach for code generation and for each AST node a corresponding C or LLVM template is populated with the details from the AST node. So far code generation has only been in an experimental stage but I can already tell you from this experimental experience that targeting LLVM is certainly far more straight forward than targeting the GCC back-end. It would certainly be nice to see a Pascal compiler targeting LLVM but as I said, this should probably be considered a new project and no longer GNU Pascal. Even with an LLVM Pascal compiler available, I still believe it would be beneficial to sustain GNU Pascal (as a Pascal compiler targeting the GCC back-end). Anyway, good luck to you and the GNU Pascal community -- Projects mentioned in this post: GNU Modula-2 (http://www.nongnu.org/gm2) LLVM Compiler Infrastructure (http://llvm.org) Objective Modula-2 (http://objective.modula2.net) Modula-2 R10 (http://www.ohloh.net/p/m2r10)