llvm dev - Dec 2007 - [LLVMdev] Automatic assembler generation?

I've just started looking into code generation and have a newbie 
question: Is there enough information in the .td files to make a tool to 
  automatically generate an assembler from them? Is a project like that 
in the works?

-Rich

Quoting Richard Pennington <rich at pennware.com>:
> I've just started looking into code generation and have a newbie
> question: Is there enough information in the .td files to make a tool to
>   automatically generate an assembler from them? Is a project like that
> in the works?
>
> -Rich
Hi

your question is reasonable, but it is probably out of scope for LLVM. There
have been some architecture description languages (ADLs) proposed for
specifying a machine description and generating all software development tools
(for compilation down to object code and for simulation) from there. A decent
(and realistic) approach would aim in generating binutils-specific source files
for the basic tools (as, ld, objdump at least) since binutils are quite mature.

There are references to new-generation ADLs based on XML DTDs but these are
mostly held in private.

Kind regards
Nikolaos Kavvadias

Hi,

Nikolaos Kavvadias wrote:
> Quoting Richard Pennington <rich at pennware.com>:
> > I've just started looking into code generation and have a newbie
> > question: Is there enough information in the .td files to make a
> > tool to automatically generate an assembler from them? Is a project
> > like that in the works?
> 
> your question is reasonable, but it is probably out of scope for LLVM.
> There have been some architecture description languages (ADLs)
> proposed for specifying a machine description and generating all
> software development tools (for compilation down to object code and
> for simulation) from there. A decent (and realistic) approach would
> aim in generating binutils-specific source files for the basic tools
> (as, ld, objdump at least) since binutils are quite mature.
The work of Norman Ramsey is a reasonable place to start reading up on
this.  http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/

Cheers,


Ralph.