Hi, I am creating a JIT compiler for C building upon the Sparse library. The project is hosted on GitHub (link below) and has the same license as Sparse. Initially I plan to build the backend by reusing the Sparse LLVM backend hence my interest in making sure that it works correctly. But in the long run, I would like a backend that is really compact - LLVM is just too big a beast. I am currently considering nanojit as the alternative backend. I decided to use Sparse as a front-end as it seems to be fully featured as a C front-end, and also does lot more than a simple parser. The fact that it produces SSA IR is perfect for my needs. I did not want to use a front-end such as Clang because of the sheer size and complexity of Clang which results from supporting C++ and Objective C. I want to build a relatively small and compact JIT engine that doesn't have a lot of extra baggage. To reuse Sparse as the JIT engine, I am making some changes to it. Primarily I have removed (almost) all global state - as I needed the ability to clean up all state after each compilation run, and serve any number of requests within the same process instance. The other changes are to do with making sure that Sparse can be compiled using MSVC - so I had to change some of the gcc specific C features used in Sparse. The interest in a JIT engine for C arose from my attempt to create a JIT compiler for the Lua language. I have coded this in LLVM but it is too tedious to code and maintain. Being able to use a C based JIT will make life much easier. Not only that it also makes it easier to switch to a non-LLVM backend. I think Sparse is an amazing project - so many thanks to you all for creating it, and for making it available under MIT license. Link to my project: https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/dmr_c Thanks and Regards Dibyendu -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-sparse" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
