A report on the progress of GNU Modula-2 and its potential integration into GCC

This paper reports on the status of the GNU Modula-2 front end to GCC and the extensions made to Modula-2 and gdb to ease its potential integration into the main GCC source tree. GNU Modula-2 (gm2) is maturing into a reliable tool and it now builds and passes its regression tests on the following platforms: x86, Opteron, Athlon 64, Alpha, Itanium processors running GNU/Linux, Sparc based Solaris, PowerPC MacOS, x86 Open Darwin and the x86 processor running FreeBSD. GNU Modula-2 currently conforms to all three Programming in Modula-2 dialects as defined by Wirth. The paper also describes the two categories of language extensions made. The first category follows the tradition of other GCC front ends by allowing the in-lining of assembly language, conditional compilation, procedure inlining and allowing users to cleanly exploit the GCC library of built-in functions and constants. The second category provide easy access to C libraries. The work presented here discusses the portable implementation of open arrays, module priorities, coroutine primitives and multi-word sets. It also reports on many of the key design decisions taken during the construction of GNU Modula-2 and their various implications.