Ram initialization and small c.

[Ronald G. Minnich]

On 19 Feb 2003, Jeremy Jackson wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 14:11, Steve M. Gehlbach wrote:
> 
> > Will you be able to use the gnu pre-processor unchanged? or adapt it?  The
> > macro expansion seems pretty important.
> 
> FYI, I was reading about newer GCC (3.2?) that have merged the
> preprocessor into the main parser.

I have been on the hunt for small c-like compilers. I have yet to find one 
that runs in the registers only, i.e. has an addressable memory of 16 
words. 

My concern about a full-blown c compiler is this: we are going to move
from debugging 1000 or so lines of assembly to debugging the compiler, and
shipping a full compiler with linuxbios, just to eliminate this 1000 or so
lines of assembly. It seems hard to justify. Since we will be the probable
only users of this compiler the support burden will fall on us. There are
not that many people out there needing a compiler that does this "your
memory is only your register set" capability.

Is there another way? Could we, for example, build a tool that would take
a description of the actions for turning on memory and generate the code?  
This would be a specialized "little language". I'm looking for those too
-- sort of a "meta assembler".

I once wrote an OS using a set of "algol-like" assembler macros. It wasn't 
perfect but the job of writing the OS was considerably reduced. Should we 
do this? 

I think we would all like something better than assembly for the hard 
memory turn-on step, I am just not sure it is a C compiler.

thanks

ron