[LLVMdev] Automatic assembler generation?

[nkavv at physics.auth.gr]

Quoting Richard Pennington <rich at pennware.com>:

> I've just started looking into code generation and have a newbie
> question: Is there enough information in the .td files to make a tool to
>   automatically generate an assembler from them? Is a project like that
> in the works?
>
> -Rich

Hi

your question is reasonable, but it is probably out of scope for LLVM. There
have been some architecture description languages (ADLs) proposed for
specifying a machine description and generating all software development tools
(for compilation down to object code and for simulation) from there. A decent
(and realistic) approach would aim in generating binutils-specific source files
for the basic tools (as, ld, objdump at least) since binutils are quite mature.

There are references to new-generation ADLs based on XML DTDs but these are
mostly held in private.

Kind regards
Nikolaos Kavvadias