[CLOWNFISH-25] Implement CFC as Clownfish project

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: Compiler
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Nikolas Wellnhofer
• Created: 13/Dec/14 14:43
• Updated: 22/Jul/16 15:43

Description

I think it's really important to implement CFC as a Clownfish project as soon as possible. This has several benefits:

• Increases productivity and performance.
• Every additional Clownfish project helps with refinement of the runtime API.
• Documentation can be easily generated.
• Allows to share code between the runtime and compiler.

If CFC depends on the runtime and the runtime needs CFC to compile, this creates a bootstrapping problem that can be resolved as follows:

• Make the Clownfish runtime self-hosting.
  • Don't create the CFC-generated files on every build.
  • Add an initial version of the generated files to version control. This must de done separately for every host language.
  • Only recreate these files on demand.
  • cfish_platform.h is an exception. Provide a static version that includes charmony.h and uses the CHY macros directly.
• Make the Clownfish runtime available to CFC.
  • Generate Clownfish runtime headers and add them to CFC version control to make CFC self-hosting like the runtime.
  • Link CFC against the Clownfish runtime.

Then we could proceed and

• Switch CFC over to Clownfish strings.
  • Start with high-level functions like CFCUtil_write_file. Work downwards to lower-level functions.
• Implement CFC classes as Clownfish classes. This can be done base class by base class.

Working on the .cfh files of the compiler would look like this:

• Keep a CFC binary from a previous build around.
• Change .cfh files and rebuild the generated files using the old CFC binary.
• Rebuild CFC.
• Recreate the the generated files using the the freshly built CFC.
• Check whether output is OK.
• Commit changes to generated files.