OpenEuphoria

1. Translate once, run anywhere.

• Posted by SDPringle Jun 08, 2022
• 1653 views

It has been a problem that once we have code in C it is fixed to one platform and architecture or another. To me the code produced by the translator should be portable. Testing this is rather adhoc though. Is there anyone around with 32-bit systems or UNIX systems that are not Linux who would like to participate in experiments of getting a translated to C helloworld program to compile so the buildsys can eventually do the right thing and create portable C code?

3. Re: Translate once, run anywhere.

• Posted by mitgedanken Jun 10, 2022
• 1609 views

I suggest to use LLVM as backend. It's portable. But it needs time. So, I guess it will be done for 5.0?

5. Re: Translate once, run anywhere.

• Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jun 10, 2022
• 1571 views

I'm not sure what the cost/benefit trade-off looks like for something like LLVM. I think we'd effectively just be adopting LLVM as a platform with a front-end for ingesting Euphoria code to LLVM IR (intermediate representation).

Euphoria already has its own IR, but we call it IL (intermediate language) and it's very much purpose-built for Euphoria, while LLVM IR is meant as an abstracted layer between any language and any architecture.

Don't get me wrong, LLVM is great and I'd love to see somebody build a Euphoria front-end for LLVM at some point. It'd be a neat project! But I think it would be a new dialect of the language (like Phix) and not "Euphoria" per se.

Other similar projects I've looked at are QBE which is lighter-weight but sadly only supports x64, and TinyCC which supports various platforms and is relatively portable and supports many architectures.

If anything, what I may do in the future is package TinyCC with Euphoria so the translator always has something to use out of the box, and users could still choose GCC if they want. Hypothetically it could also provide JIT-style execution.

I'm not sure I understand what problems we have that this project would solve?

I don't think Shawn was proposing we make portable binaries just that the C code coming out of the translator be identical regardless of where it's run from, and then rely on the compiler to make the platform-specific executable or library.

One thing I'd really like to see is being able to "load" a DLL built with the translator as if it were an include file. That would require exporting a symbol and then having a way to import it again later.

-Greg

7. Re: Translate once, run anywhere.

• Posted by SDPringle Jun 13, 2022
• 1489 views

The eu3.1 code is written with assumptions about pointer size. Simply translating it to C wouldn't have fixed that. Why would you want to use 3.1?

9. Re: Translate once, run anywhere.

• Posted by gdm85 Sep 27, 2022
• 983 views

Hi there,

I come from this other thread; I would be interested in making sure that all sources to build Euphoria can be generated from scratch; as I understand that requires the pre-translated sources.

Unfortunately I cannot manage to generate them using Ubuntu/Debian.

Would anyone be interested in helping out to achieve this?