Re: [rfc] built-in native compiler for Linux?

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:34:49 -0400 (EDT)

> On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
>> What i think makes sense is to build a _new_ precompiler / compiler
>> / assembler / linker combo for Linux, from scratch, hosted in the
>> kernel proper.
>>
>> A good technical basis for that would be Sparse, and it could start
>> by acting as a drop-in replacement for CPP and it could feed its
>> output to GCC with little changes. Sparse is small, has a very tidy
>> code base and is already useful today as an extended static source
>> code checker.
> 
> A new preprocessor would be great. If we can make sparse do what CPP does
> now then lets go for it.

It's just too bad that we'll lose the performance gained from the
fact that GCC's CPP is linked into the C compiler binary and thus
doesn't have to transfer it's result over a pipe or anything like
that.

I really think this whole idea isn't a very smart one.  I would
rather have whoever would be working on a sparse backend instead
be working on kernel improvements.

I also think people underestimate how much work this would be.