[LLVMdev] GSoC project questions.

[Hal Finkel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Anton Korobeynikov" <anton at korobeynikov.info>
> To: "James Courtier-Dutton" <james.dutton at gmail.com>
> Cc: "Hal Finkel" <hfinkel at anl.gov>, "Bill Wendling" <isanbard at gmail.com>, "LLVM Developers Mailing List"
> <llvmdev at cs.uiuc.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2013 9:12:39 AM
> Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] GSoC project questions.
> 
> > I agree that creating a complete Fortran compiler is a huge effort.
> > But what about approaching it from a test driven development
> > perspective?
> > We start with a few small Fortran programs as "test cases".
> > The GSoC task then gives the task as getting test case 1 to work.
> > We could also apply this of "lfort". Determine a test case that
> > currently
> > fails on lfort, and ask the GSoC task to pass the test.
> All this make sense only if there is interested party in long-term
> development and maintenance. Otherwise the code will bitrot really
> quickly and thus will be waste of time and money. Is there such a
> party?

I am certainly interested in long-term development and maintenance. I think that the first step toward making a useful Fortran compiler is this:

 1. It should be able to compile BLAS: http://www.netlib.org/blas/ (these are Fortran 77, and have no I/O, so should be relatively simple)

 2. If that is complete, then move on to LAPACK: http://www.netlib.org/lapack/index.html (these use some subset of Fortran 90)

As you can see from the test cases currently in lfort, most of the driver functionality and lexical analysis (for both Fortran 77 and 90) is done, and I've started on parsing (and semantic analysis and codegen for) variable declarations and some simple statements. I think that a motivated student could make a lot of headway, and should be able to at least finish step 1. Thoughts?

 -Hal

> 
> --
> With best regards, Anton Korobeynikov
> Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics, Saint Petersburg State
> University
>