Modula-2 Language Frontend Patches Ready For Merging Into GCC 13

In addition to today seeing the GCC Rust front-end being declared ready for merging with its latest patch series sent out today, the Modula-2 front-end sent out its third revision which is also expected to now be merged as another new programming language front-end for GCC 13.

While most Phoronix readers are probably well familiar with the Rust programming language, far fewer of you are familiar with Modula-2. Modula-2 is one of the languages developed by Niklaus Wirth in the 1980s as a procedural programming language that succeeded his earlier work on Modula and most notably Pascal. Modula-2 was succeeded by Modula-3 and Oberon but nearly forty years later the GNU Compiler Collection is adding a Modula-2 front-end.

Modula-2 enjoyed use by the Lilith workstations, the Russian GLONASS navigation satellites, and various aging embedded systems. For several years, passionate Modula-2 developers have been trying to get their Modula-2 language front-end merged into GCC.

Modula-2 code sample.

Last month the Modula-2 GCC front-end patches were sent out for review as a rewrite of the earlier code. GNU Modula-2 implements the PIM2, PIM3, PIM4 and ISO dialects of Modula-2 and the compiler code has been tested on x86_64 and AArch64.

Last month the Modula-2 front-end patches were declared okay for merging by Richard Biener but that a final patch series should be sent out.

Today that v3 patch series of the Modula-2 front-end was sent out with the remaining tidying up of the code and documentation work. With that it looks like the Modula-2 front-end code will be merged soon to mainline for the GCC 13 stable compiler release next year.

Those wishing to learn more about the Modula-2 programming language can do so at Modula2.org.