There is still active work on CM3/PM3 ongoing; im****tant and substantial
changes have been committed during the recent months. I think the
situation improves, though slowly:
Paul Vixie wrote:
> i switched back to C some years ago, and as much as i'd prefer M3, the
fact
> that there are two incompatible language variants (CM3, PM3) and that
every
The (more recent) CM3 compiler has been imtegrated into the PM3 code
distribution quite some time ago; differences between the code
distributions are not really that great. There has been no official
PM3 release though recently, since Elego uses and concentrates on
the CM3 distribution.
> OS needs extensive library-level ****ting to map structures in
/usr/include/sys
> and that it's not a standard backend for GCC means that it "falls just
short"
> of my minimum requirements for a development platform.
It's not a standard backend because the FSF people never accepted the
code that cir***vented their license IIRC :-( There's currently a
working gcc-3.4 backend though, and work is ongoing on a current gcc 4
backend.
One of the big ****ting problems, system dependencies due to the need for
memory protection, has been eliminated by extending the code generator
to produce hints for the garbage collector for incremental and
generational collection strategies; so ****ting to a new platform should
be significantly easier. Indeed it should not need more than a couple
of days to get the system up on a new target platform if all needed
information is available.
Staying up-to-date with respect to OS releases could still be made
much easier by abstracting most of the system specific interfaces
into a standard POSIX layer within the runtime and dealing with some
differences in C code. (Any volunteers for this project? :)
> which is a darned shame. code written in M3 looks like what it does,
and does
> what it looks like, to a higher degree than in any other language i've
ever
> used. and unlike CL or C++, it's *fast*. as fast as C in most
situations.
I can second that. I would also dearly love to see M3 more widely used.
> what i guess i need is some interns who want to work on "Common
Modula-3" as
> a single-standard based on GCC4 with intent to make the backend part of
GCC.
> (there's no formal application process for it yet, just send me some
e-mail.)
We could also try again to contribute the current gcc M3 backend to the
gcc distribution (which would avoid another M3 implementation), but I
think we'd need to name a maintainer for that part. I wouldn't dare to
point at someone for this task :)
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