[LLVMdev] request for tutorial

[Rafael Espíndola]

On 25 September 2013 12:28, Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org>
> wrote:
>>
> (Devil's advocate, but half serious):
>
> It may be a good idea to require that the dummy backend is kept up to date,
> as a way to keep a pulse on changes to the interfaces between the
> target-independent and target-dependent parts of LLVM. A slightly idealized
> way to put it is that the dummy backend would be a "living definition" of
> the boundary between the target-dependent and target-independent parts of
> LLVM. By virtue of being just a stub, complexity related to being a "real
> backend" could be removed, so that when you look at a file inside the stub
> backend, you know that there isn't extraneous junk that some other target
> wouldn't have: everything there is essentially an example of something that
> every target has in common.
>

These things have a tendency to bitrot. When I started looking at gcc
it had an example frontend (treelang). The problem was that it was
updated just enough to keep it building. It didn't follow the best
practices that the other frontends had been moved too. In the end it
was easier to read the fortran FE code than treelang's.

Cheers,
Rafael