Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Engster]

David Engster writes:
> Richard Stallman writes:
>> I am very concerned lest the GCC back ends to be replaced with LLVM,
>> which permits proprietary changes and proprietary back ends.
>
> As Oscar already mentioned, this has already happened, although this
> effort is now largely abandoned. It might be revived of course, but
> there's not much incentive to do so. Instead, people rather right new
> frontends. For instance, there was already work done on 'flang', a
> Fortran frontend, and new languages like Mozilla's "Rust" use LLVM as
> their backend right from the beginning.

To back this up: GCC ships with frontends for C/C++/ObjC, Fortran, Java,
Go, and Ada. AFAIK, the Java frontend is in maintenance mode and not
actively developed anymore, and I'm not sure about Go's status, since
the Go people have their own compiler nowadays.

LLVM already has native frontends for C/C++/ObjC (clang), Java, and Go,
and a maybe halfway finished one for Fortran. So it seems the only GCC
frontend that LLVM is actually missing is Ada.

-David