[cfe-dev] Summer of Code ideas

[Charles Davis]

Hi,

I intend to participate in Google's Summer of Code this year, so I'd
like to bounce some ideas around to see what you guys think. Here they
are, in no particular order:

1. Implement nesC support. nesC (which stands for "Networked Embedded
Systems C") is a dialect of the C language. It is used heavily in the
embedded operating system TinyOS. The problem is that the current nesC
compiler is just a wrapper around gcc, operating similarly to Cfront for
C++ by turning nesC code into C code that gcc can compile. With Clang,
we have an opportunity to do better. I don't know if you want me to
integrate this, but I'm throwing this out there anyway. If you don't,
I'll probably pursue this as a separate project, writing wrappers around
Clang's libraries.

2. Modularize C++ ABI support. This is something that I think we need to
do eventually--especially if we want to support other C++ ABIs, like the
Microsoft ABI (which is the de facto standard on Windows; and I can
envision uses for Wine... :). Right now, though, Clang (like GCC) is
hardcoded to generate code for the Itanium/GNU ABI. I won't actually
implement a second ABI; I'll just abstract the current Itanium ABI away
into its own class(es); then later we can have other C++ ABIs.

Chip