i370 port

["Paul Edwards" <mutazilah@gmail.com>]

Hello GCC maintainers.

There used to be an i370 target for GCC.  It was written in 1989,
and put into GCC 2.5 in 1993.

It has always been semi-working, but never good enough to
actually use.

It was dropped from GCC 4 when there was supposedly no
maintainer available.  Actually, Dave Pitts and myself were
both maintaining it at that time, but we were both still working
on an old version of it (3.2). So gcc 3.4.6, circa 2004, was the
last time it was included in the normal GCC distribution.

We were both maintaining it, and continue to maintain it,
because MVS doesn't have any alternate free C compiler
available.

As of yesterday, after years of work, an i370 version was 
released that is now fully working.  The code generator has 
no known bugs that would stop it from being C90-compliant,
and GCC can fully regenerate itself, with full optimization.  

You can see it here:

http://gccmvs.sourceforge.net

It's based on GCC 3.2.3.

There is also a free i370 emulator (Hercules) and a free i370-based 
operating system (MVS/380) that enables the compiler to be fully 
tested and fully regenerate itself on its native environment.  Not
only that, but there is an effort underway to allow this free
environment to be made available on the internet so that Unix
users can do an MVS build (takes around 4 hours if done properly
- ie 3 stage, full optimization, on an emulated machine), from the 
safety of their Unix box.

Both of those products are also under active development by a
community of mainframe enthusiasts.

In addition, that code has been ported to GCC 3.4.6, which is now
working as a cross-compiler at least.  It's still some months away
from working natively though.  It takes a lot of effort to convert
the Posix-expecting GCC compiler into C90 compliance.  This has
been done though, in a way that has minimal code changes to the
GCC mainline.

There is a lot of other activity (e.g. availability of REXX, PL/1, Cobol)
that rests on the C compiler being available.

So, my question is - what is required to get the i370 port reinstated
into the GCC mainline?

Yes, I'm aware that there is an S/390 port, but it isn't EBCDIC, isn't
HLASM, isn't 370, isn't C90, isn't MVS.  It may well be possible to
change all those things, and I suspect that in a few years from now
I may be sending another message asking what I need to do to get 
all my changes to the s390 target into the s390 target.  At that time,
I suspect there will be a lot of objection to "polluting" the s390 target
with all those "unnecessary" things.

So, here's hoping that the i370 port can end up where it was originally
intended to end up, and that all the effort that was spent in the GCC
mainline to get rid of the ASCII assumptions can now be put to good
use.

BFN.  Paul.