Re: Mono and GNOME. The long reply.

[Tom Tromey <tromey redhat com>]

>>>>> "Sergey" == Sergey V Udaltsov <sergey oudaltsov clients ie> writes:

>> From what I remember, GCC is heavily targeted towards "register
>> based" platforms.  And the CLI is a "stack based" platform.

Sergey> AFAIK Java execution model is stack based too. This did not
Sergey> stop gcj developers.

gcj can generate Java .class files.  However, it does this in a
special way, by generating the bytecode directly from the tree
structures.  It never generates RTL, and the bytecode generator isn't
an ordinary back end.

Writing a .class back end to gcc is possible (and in fact I think one
was written but no one has submitted it), but my understanding is that
first it is non-trivial and second, supporting languages like C would
require runtime support.

Whether one would want to write the C# compiler as part of gcc depends
largely on one's goals.  If you never intend to generate native code,
it is probably not worth the trouble.  Writing a gcc front end isn't
that easy, since the fundamental data structures are largely
undocumented.

Tom