Re: technology discussion → does the world need a "new" C ?

On 06/07/2024 19:46, BGB wrote:

But, yeah, for most people, writing the compiler is always "someone else's problem".
  Granted, even with as much suck as it was to write my own C compiler to target my ISA, it is still likely a better experience than it would have been trying to retarget GCC or Clang.
 GCC is sort of a tangled mess of code, trying to add a new target would likely involve weaving it in all across the codebase, which is comparably fairly large (well into MLOC territory IIRC).
  Any desire to retarget Clang is limited by the issue that it would involve needing to edit and recompile LLVM a large number of times, and LLVM takes an absurdly long time to recompile...
 They are like "well, use -j N".
   But, like, "-j 1": It takes like 4 hours;
   "-j 4": It still takes around 1 hour, PC still usable.
   "-j 8": It takes 45 minutes, but PC is made unusable.
 Doing so also eats most of the RAM, on a PC with 112 GB... (Can't install a full 128GB with my MOBO/chipset it seems).
 At "-j 8", the HDD with the pagefile is basically running at full capacity.

Those figures are extraordinary.
But do you really need to recompile everything in LLVM even when changing only target-specific components?
How much of it is due to it using C++ rather than C?
Maybe you should consult with David Brown who doesn't believe in the benefits of fast compilers, and always knows some tricks to get a build-time in seconds no matter how slow the compiler.
With my own tools, that run on one core with 8GB (2GB of which seems tied up with the display for some reason, even though the HD display needs only a 0.006GB frame buffer), I can't do anything else when compiling, because it will have finished before I've taken my finger off the Enter key!
This is largely thanks to machines now being so fast rather than my coding skills, but also because I've never managed to learn how to write huge, bloated, inefficient software.
I don't like products like LLVM; one reason I'm still doing this stuff is to makes a stand.
(About 10 years ago I needed a new side-gate for my house. Rather than buy one, I made one myself that was a perfect size, 6' high. If the people behind LLVM made garden gates, theirs would have been 9 MILES high! Probably 15 miles now.)

  It is a mystery why anyone uses LLVM, I would have considered it a dead end due to all this...

Apparently it takes care of all that pesky back-end stuff. For me it would make the task a thousand times harder. Plus I'd end up with a compiler of which only 0.4% was my own work; 99.6% somebody else's. Based on typical LLVM-based compilers being 100MB.