Re: Augusta: An open source Ada 2012 compiler (someday?)

[Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

On 2014-03-19 14:56, Tero Koskinen wrote:

> Me too! (Started to write a compiler as a hobby.)

It's definitely an interesting area to tinker with.

> Combined with Antlr 4 these new "JVM languages" are quite good
> for prototyping various areas of compiler design. You get
> results quick enough that you don't get bored.

Yes, for small languages they do work well. How well such an approach
scales to a full sized language (of any sort) is much less clear. I am
also curious about the extent to which the functional paradigm can be
used to simplify(?) compiler implementation. Scala, like many functional
languages has nice pattern matching features that seem to be useful but
that is just a small matter in the grand scheme of functional programming.

> What comes to Ada compilers,
> it is nice to always see someone to start a new open source
> Ada compiler to "compete" with GNAT (or just for hobby), however
> in the history all of the earlier attempts have sadly failed.

It is easy to understand why. I intend to work around this issue by just
redefining "success." Of course my definition might not be very
interesting to most people... but that's fine.

Peter