[LLVMdev] GSoC project questions.

[Alex L]

Thanks for your replies.
Working on the lfort compiler would certainly be an interesting project for
me for this GSoC. I have studied lfort repository and commits, and I see
that it has a lot of stuff for C/C++, am I correct that this is a fork of
Clang? If this is correct, I wonder why this approach was chosen instead of
starting out from scratch - is it because Clang already has a lot of code
which can be reused for the Fortran compiler? I'm also unfamiliar with
Clang and I was a bit overwhelmed when I saw the lfort repository at first
because of this. If I were to work on this project, would I be required to
use the Clang code?


2013/4/13 Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov>

> ----- 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
> >
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