A Python Front-End To GCC Is Brewing This Summer
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Philip Herron is this two-year GSoC student and he's working on Gccpy, which is an effort to write a Python front-end to GCC. From his GSoC project page, "An overview of what the project aims to achieve is creating an AOT compiled version of Python using GCC as a framework for middle-end, back-end optimization as-well as portable code-generation. Creating AOT languages has been generally aimed for more 'low-level' languages such as C/C++/Fortran where the language requires strong typing and other kinds declarative features; which gives rise to much less dynamic features which languages like Python/PHP/Perl take for granted." The project came to my attention when today he created this GCC mailing list thread.
Philip was inspired by PHC, a PHP compiler that leverages the GNU Compiler Collection (see the PHC project web-site). PHC isn't too actively maintained today, but in a similar manner, Facebook has the HipHop compiler for converting PHP source-code into highly-optimized C++ that's then built by GCC. In a competing manner, Roadsend PHP is a now-defunct project to do the same, but to use LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) rather than GCC.
For those more interested in the Python front-end to GCC project, the student developer has a blog where he is writing about his project on this endeavor.
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