Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Engster]

Richard Stallman writes:
> I am very concerned lest the GCC back ends to be replaced with LLVM,
> which permits proprietary changes and proprietary back ends.

As Oscar already mentioned, this has already happened, although this
effort is now largely abandoned. It might be revived of course, but
there's not much incentive to do so. Instead, people rather right new
frontends. For instance, there was already work done on 'flang', a
Fortran frontend, and new languages like Mozilla's "Rust" use LLVM as
their backend right from the beginning.

That aside, I would dump the AST in some form of LISP structure and
probably for other tools as JSON and XML (I don't want this to be an
Emacs-only thing). For feeding LLVM however, one would much rather use
one of GCC's intermediate representations, to which LLVM was designed to
be more or less compatible.

-David