Comment by cornstalks
15 days ago
You've done some great work but I have to call BS with this claim:
> I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it.
Sean Baxter is an easy counter example.
15 days ago
You've done some great work but I have to call BS with this claim:
> I'm the only person who ever implemented all of it.
Sean Baxter is an easy counter example.
I don't know much of anything about him. Did he implement the preprocessor? the optimizer? the code generator?
(For some context, back in the 80's, code generators needed enhancements to implement C++. You couldn't just use an existing one. Bjarne had to do some ugly workarounds because of this.)
Sean Baxter's circle compiler uses LLVM as a backend, but I believe the rest is from scratch.
Arguably these days having a clear frontend/backend separation is good compiler architecture. It might slow down compile times a bit, but it's worth the cost.
So it sounds like he wrote the frontend of a cpp compiler? There's a lot of work in other layers as well.
It wouldn't have made much sense to write the preprocessor these days, too, but it is part of the C++ compiler. Unless integrating it with the C++ lexer for speed purposes, as I did.