An ask for documentation of trees

An ask for documentation of trees

[D. Adamian]

I'm currently developing a front-end for a language. I've read in the
docs that using RTL for interfacing front-end and the bulk of GCC is
a Bad Thing. And that trees should be used for it.

So the question is: what should be done in the front-end to use
trees? The language is not much similar to C, so some new types of
tree nodes should be defined and implemented. How is this done?

Thanks in advance.

Re: An ask for documentation of trees

[Fergus Henderson]

On 21-Oct-2002, D. Adamian <dima@pulsepow.hop.stu.neva.ru> wrote:
> I'm currently developing a front-end for a language. I've read in the
> docs that using RTL for interfacing front-end and the bulk of GCC is
> a Bad Thing. And that trees should be used for it.

That's correct.

> So the question is: what should be done in the front-end to use
> trees?

See the "treelang" example.

> The language is not much similar to C, so some new types of
> tree nodes should be defined and implemented. How is this done?

Note that for the Mercury front-end, I didn't define any new tree nodes,
even though Mercury is very different from C.

But if you really do need to or want to define your own tree nodes,
have a look at java/java-tree.def and java/java-tree.h for an example.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

Re: An ask for documentation of trees

[S. Bosscher]

>  I'm currently developing a front-end for a language. I've read
>  in the docs that using RTL for interfacing front-end and the bulk
>  of GCC is a Bad Thing. And that trees should be used for it. So 
>  the question is: what should be done in the front-end to use 
>  trees? The language is not much similar to C, so some new types of 
>  tree nodes should be defined and implemented. How is this done? 
>  Thanks in advance.

1) Check out the tree-ssa branch, see the projects/tree-ssa/ for 
information about this.

2) Have a look at the C++ front end.

3) Go see http://home.wanadoo.nl/btp91/gcc/gcc-ast.html. It's incomplete
but still useful.

4) Have a look at http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/, and read
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Trees.html#Trees. These pages
try to document what you can find in {tree, c-common, cp-tree}.{def,h}. 

Hope this helps,

Greetz
Steven