Re: [Tecomp-user] Interested in tecomp

[Helmut B. <hel...@gm...>]

Hello Greg,

I discovered today that there exists the "mono" project which makes .NET 
available on the Unix world. That changes the picture a lot.

So I am considering now of having a .NET backend for tecomp in the future.

On the mono site I have found that a version of gcc is available which 
generates .NET il-code. Since I am considering making a variant of 
tecomp which can act as language frontend for gcc, the .NET il-code 
generation might come for free.

I will publish a roadmap paper for tecomp soon on the tecomp website.

Regards
Helmut

The Eiffel Compiler: http://tecomp.sourceforge.net
Download: http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/tecomp 



Helmut Brandl wrote:
> Hello Greg,
>
> thank you for your interest in tecomp. I was interesting for me to 
> read that I am not the only one, who is unhappy with the available 
> Eiffel compilers. I don't know if we are unhappy for the same reasons. 
> I am happy to tell you my basic thoughts which drove me towards the 
> development of tecomp.
>
> First of all I am convinced that Eiffel is one of the best programming 
> languages of the imperative kind around. Allthough existing for more 
> than 20 years now I was wondering whether it has not yet had the 
> success it deserves.
>
> I have tried different compilers for Eiffel. The first one was 
> SmartEiffel. SmartEiffel is a pretty good Eiffel compiler which 
> generates high performance code. It has the classical architecture of 
> compiling first to C and then to native. The thing which did not 
> convince me was the mindset of the SmartEiffel team of trying to 
> establish their own dialect of Eiffel and the fact that being a 
> research project might not attract any professional software 
> developing companies (they are looking for standards and a reliable 
> toolsets).
>
> The next thing I tried was EiffelStudio. But after the installation I 
> was horrified by the 500 MBytes installed size and by the huge files 
> needed even to compile miniprojects like e.g. a simple "Hello, 
> world!"-program.
>
> The good thing is that the Eiffel language is now standardized, so a 
> stable base for developing an Eiffel compiler and using Eiffel in a 
> professional context is given.
>
> I decided to write my own Eiffel compiler which compiles standard 
> Eiffel. But I didn't want to just copy the compiling strategy of the 
> other available compilers. Since in the classical Eiffel compilers 
> (which compile to native via C) the bottleneck is the C compiler. So I 
> decided to compile to an internal representation and as a first step 
> interpret the internal representation in a virtual machine. The result 
> is amazing. Compilation to internal represetation is pretty fast and 
> running the code tecomp's virtual machine has reasonable runtime 
> performance (clearly not comparable to native code, but comparable to 
> other virtual execution engines without a JIT).
>
> The internal representation can be used as a base for other backends. 
> Clearly tecomp will be able to compile to C, so that any valid C 
> compiler can convert the code into high performance native code. I am 
> also thinking about integrating tecomp into gcc or combine it with the 
> "low level virtual machine" (llvm). But that has not yet been decided 
> because the first goal is to reach compliance with the Eiffel standard 
> by the end of the year. And there is still a lot to be done (garbage 
> collection, exception handling, void safety, etc.).
>
> As parser I use bison/flex which are the gnu versions of yacc/lex. I 
> used bison/flex because I know them well. But anyhow, the parser/lexer 
> are just a minor part of an Eiffel compiler and bison/flex do a good 
> job and have a suberb performance.
>
> I want tecomp to be able to run on all unices and on windows so I 
> don't want to concentrate on anything that is just available on one of 
> the operating systems (e.g. I don't know of any versions of .NET on 
> unix).
>
> If you want to discuss tecomp or Eiffel issues further I would like to 
> invite you to the tecomp maling list 
> (http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=208120), so that the other 
> tecomp users can benefit from the discussion. Any 
> thoughts/remarks/suggestions/critique are welcome.
>
> Regards
> Helmut
>
>
> Greg Compestine wrote:
>> Message body follows:
>>
>> Hello Mr. Brandl,
>>
>> I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent post in
>> comp.lang.eiffel about the tecomp project. I'd been thinking
>> for a while of taking a stab at writing my own compiler,
>> since I've been pretty unhappy with the implementations I've
>> encountered to date.
>>
>> I'm interested in finding out about your reasons for
>> undertaking this project, and what sets tecomp apart from
>> the other Eiffel compilers.
>>
>> My own notion for a compiler was to use Antlr to create the
>> parser, and .Net for the virtual machine. Antler, because
>> I've done a bunch of bottom up parsers in the past, and this
>> looks different. And .Net to eliminate the problems with
>> integrating Eiffel to third party libraries. (I've recently
>> gone through a nightmare experience of wrapping a C++
>> library in Eiffel. The available facilities are terribly
>> inadequate, and I could have accomplished the same thing in
>> .Net in a few minutes, instead of a few months.)
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Greg C
>>
>>   
>