Re: [Tinycc-devel] CFront for TinyCC?

[Christian Jullien]

The main problem is that you're not supposed to use it but just study it.  
You can for example write few lines of pre-iso C++ and see how an
implementation (the CFront) translates it to pure C.
It may be useful to see a possible implementation of vtbl and virtual
function calls for example. The ARM from Stroustrup is a very valuable
source to understand possible internal representation of C++ in C.

Don't expect to write real C++ code which, except for simple example, will
not run on any other implementations.

If you write anything with CFront, you'll have to rewrite your code for any
modern C++ compiler.

We don't have the permission to extend Cfront, for the best, we are just
allowed to make few patches to let it work on the target C compiler. No
more!!

We are not allowed to fix bugs or implement missing things from any of the
C++ standards.

So, Cfront interest is very limited.


-----Original Message-----
From: Tinycc-devel [mailto:tinycc-devel-bounces+eligis=orange.fr@nongnu.org]
On Behalf Of Steffen Nurpmeso
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2021 18:35
To: jullien@eligis.com
Cc: tinycc-devel@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: [Tinycc-devel] CFront for TinyCC?

Christian Jullien wrote in
 <000c01d7cff0$b9c009b0$2d401d10$@orange.fr>:
 |Hi Domingo,
 |This is very interesting but I wonder what it will be used for?
 |
 |Stroustrup and others explicitly say that CFront should not be used \
 |for any purpose except for historical research purpose:
 |
 |http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/index.html#rele\
 |ase_30
 |"The source code in this section is posted with the permission of the \
 |copyright owner for historical research purposes only."
 |
 |It's fine if you use it within this scope otherwise you should not \
 |promote this dev. as a way to have a "kind of" C++ on top of tcc.

Oh i _always_ hated that thing one had to read after egcs ended in
g++ saying "generates real object code"!
I love languages like Nim (never used it but i think it really
rocks programmers) who provide a syntax and hints that rock
programmers, but preprocesses the outcome to plain C that can be
build with basic compilers!  Isn't that just fantastic??

However as far as i know they simply failed to pimp that thing for
templates etc, which is why they gave up on it?  I personally
would love to be able to write C+, a bit of namespaces, simple
templates and objects with methods (as opposed to functions with
objects) on top of plain C.  That is overly cool.

I did not know about cfront-3, thanks for the pointer, i will try
it once i have new bandwidth.  It once tried to bring cfront to
live from an archived version from the beginning of the 90s or so,
i have forgotten where that came from.  Non-Plan9.  But i gave up,
too much effort for some island that will never make it.

Cool!

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

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