[Ecls-list] CRITICAL NEED FOR HELP

[Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 6:40 AM, David Blubaugh <davidblubaugh2000 at yahoo.com>
wrote:
>
> To All,
>
> I was wondering if it was possible to extend support for the ImpulseC C
compiler codeveloper environment ???
> > What would be the first steps necessary to make this a reality ??

At first I thought it is an ordinary C compiler, but it seems it is not,
being rather speciallized for FPGA hardware. This means that it has to work
in cross-compilation mode, as the executables it produces can not be run on
the platform where compilation happens. Problems I foresee:

* Limited library support. Probably not all of POSIX
* Porting the garbage collector
* Ensuring that the GMP library builds in C mode.
* Integrating this with the Autoconf build process
* Bootstrapping. This would normally work in cross-compilation by using
another copy of ECL to build the C sources. Since the C sources depend on
platform details,  it is a quite delicate process.

I must say I have faced this request at least five times this year. People
are demanding a build process for ECL that
* Only uses makefiles, no Autoconf
* Has no bootstrapping (prebuilt C sources that work for all platforms)
* No configuration via run-time / compilation tests
* GMP is built without Autoconf and using only C or is not part of ECL at
all
* The garbage collector magically works in the destination platform without
porting.
Anybody feels fit to take over the challenge? :-)

Juanjo

--
Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC
c/ Serrano, 113b, Madrid 28006 (Spain)
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.googlepages.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/ecl-devel/attachments/20110124/dae979a5/attachment.html>