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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Ada95 to ANSI_C converter
Date: 1997/04/02
Message-ID: <dewar.859987799@merv>#1/1
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References: <dewar.859432540@merv> <5hfble$4d0$1@news.pacifier.com>
 <dewar.859559977@merv> <5htg0a$v8v$1@news.nyu.edu>
Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c
Date: 1997-04-02T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Richard said

<<I think that's a bit of an overestimate, but could be true for people who
aren't that familiar with GCC.>>

This was in reference to my guess of a person year for doing a C generating
gcc backend.

The discrepancy here has to do with your view of what it means to produce
something like this. If you are talking about just getting something
working, and someone who knows GCC is doing the work, you can cranck 
something out pretty quick (Richard did the first stage of work on the
Alpha port in about a month, including learning the architecture) ...

But to make something approach a usable product is always much more work
(as Richard also knows well if he puts his ACT hat on :-) 

One thing that would complicate this particular project substantially is
the testing. Since the idea is to get something that works on all C compilers
on all machines, reasonably thorough testing means playing on lots of
different machines, which always adds a lot of effort.