Re: [Tack-devel] Is there a plan to support more targets in the long term?

[David G. <dg...@co...>]

There is actually a Z8000 code generator, but it's nowhere near useful ---
the assembler needs overhauling, then it needs a plat etc, and then
(eventually) we have to find out if it's working. It's also using the old *old
*code generator framework so I suspect the code quality's not good.

Regarding other architectures... sure! It just needs someone willing to do
the work. The ACK's pretty easy to retarget compared to other compilers,
but it's still a substantial amount of largely undocumented engineering.
Plus, the code generation architecture is restrictive. It was intended for
use on 16-bit CISC architectures with a fixed frame pointer register and a
very limited number of other registers --- the 8086, essentially. On
register-centric or 8-bit machines it struggles.

It can be made to work: George Koehler put in heroic work and produced an
actually decent PowerPC backend. I've been overhauling the 8080 backend and
it now generates smaller code than sdcc does (note: it is, however,
slower). There's also mcg, designed for register-centric architectures,
which produces... tolerable... code; there's a MIPS backend using that.

It'd probably work well on the 6809, should anyone want to try porting it.
(There's already an assembler, but it hasn't been made to work.)

On Thu, 9 May 2019 at 15:39, Carl Eric Codere via Tack-devel <
tac...@li...> wrote:

> Greetings,
>                 On my side definitely... i even started it a bit the
> emulators architecture for both 6502 and 6809 emulators... :)
>
> Carl
>
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Fabrizio Caruso <fab...@ho...>
> Date: 2019/05/09 20:45 (GMT+08:00)
> To: tac...@li...
> Subject: [Tack-devel] Is there a plan to support more targets in the long
> term?
>
> Hi everyone!
>
> I wonder whether there is a long-term plan to revive more targets in ACK
> (such as Zilog Z8000, MOS 6502, MOS 6809, etc.).
>
> I dream of 6800-support because no cross-compiler for this target exists
> but I guess it will never be in ACK because it never was and C may not be
> the best language to code on 6800-based systems, which have very little ram.
>
>    Fabrizio
>
>
>
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>


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