* Stefan Reinauer stepan@suse.de [Aug 21. 2001 10:44]:
At the moment we're developing a C compiler with an FCode backend and an FCode tokenizer, which will allow to easily work with the actual code. The final fcode evaluator will be able to run the tokenizer itself, so it will be possible to debug drivers directly on the firmware console if neccessary. I thought about writing a backend to gcc which outputs the needed FCode, but after following some politically/religious based discussion between the people who wrote the Java Bytecode backend for gcc (which is pretty similar to fcode) and RMS concerning the possibility to work around the GPL using a bytecode backend for gcc, this seems not to be an option. Second, I'd rather prefer not to use the suboptimal output that the gcc mid level language RTL produces (at least it's pretty unusable for stack machines as java bytecode or fcode is)
And--not to forget; gcc is a big hairy smelly beast with a tremendous complexity.