[TUHS] Edison Design Group C Front End

[TUHS] Edison Design Group C Front End

[Henry Bent]

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Hi all,

I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious file
- /usr/lib/ecfe.  It turns out that this is the Edison Design Group C (not
C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident with the last release
of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4.  No other piece of the compiler
toolchain references the EDG product in any way and there is no
documentation for it whatsoever.

The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to source
translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product - is that
correct?  I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used in the Apogee C
compiler.  I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it does appear that
"cfe" is the same EDG product.  Unfortunately there is no documentation
specific to the C front end, and I don't have a license for Apogee C so I
can't run the compiler to see how it's calling cfe.  Just running a C file
"blah.c" through the IRIX front end with no switches results in a
transformed file "blah.int.c".  Unfortunately running anything even
moderately complex through the front end results in code that either
doesn't compile or doesn't run, so I feel that I must be missing some flags
or basic options.

Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or any
documentation/information in general about the EDG product?  My usual
sources came up empty.

-Henry

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[TUHS] Re: Edison Design Group C Front End

[Luther Johnson]

I don't know if you've seen this, but:

https://www.edg.com/

Edison Design Group has produced many compiler front ends, this part of
a compiler scans and parse the input language, and emits an intermediate
representation, the first representations in the chain of compiler
phases are usually a parse tree, then a cleaned-up version of the parse
tree that has removed all sorts of contingent data, tied to the the
original program, but not necessary for further processing - this is
usually called the 'abstract syntax tree'. I've never used EDG products
in my work, but I have talked with them a couple of times. I imagine if
you have an EDG front end, in addition to that output you describe, it
probably is meant to write some (possibly serialized) version of an
abstract syntax tree to some file somewhere (perhaps with the right
options on invocation).

You could call them and ask them, they seemed very friendly and helpful
a couple of years ago when I talked to them.

On 08/13/2024 12:41 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a mysterious
> file - /usr/lib/ecfe.  It turns out that this is the Edison Design
> Group C (not C++) Front End, included almost certainly by accident
> with the last release of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX 4.  No other
> piece of the compiler toolchain references the EDG product in any way
> and there is no documentation for it whatsoever.
>
> The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to
> source translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product
> - is that correct?  I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used
> in the Apogee C compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it
> does appear that "cfe" is the same EDG product.  Unfortunately there
> is no documentation specific to the C front end, and I don't have a
> license for Apogee C so I can't run the compiler to see how it's
> calling cfe.  Just running a C file "blah.c" through the IRIX front
> end with no switches results in a transformed file "blah.int.c".
> Unfortunately running anything even moderately complex through the
> front end results in code that either doesn't compile or doesn't run,
> so I feel that I must be missing some flags or basic options.
>
> Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or
> any documentation/information in general about the EDG product?  My
> usual sources came up empty.
>
> -Henry

[TUHS] Re: Edison Design Group C Front End

[Luther Johnson]

... of course it is serialized, there has to be some convention on
writing a tree out in some order to a file ... well anyway I'm sure they
can tell you what that product is and does.

On 08/13/2024 02:08 PM, Luther Johnson wrote:
> I don't know if you've seen this, but:
>
> https://www.edg.com/
>
> Edison Design Group has produced many compiler front ends, this part
> of a compiler scans and parse the input language, and emits an
> intermediate representation, the first representations in the chain of
> compiler phases are usually a parse tree, then a cleaned-up version of
> the parse tree that has removed all sorts of contingent data, tied to
> the the original program, but not necessary for further processing -
> this is usually called the 'abstract syntax tree'. I've never used EDG
> products in my work, but I have talked with them a couple of times. I
> imagine if you have an EDG front end, in addition to that output you
> describe, it probably is meant to write some (possibly serialized)
> version of an abstract syntax tree to some file somewhere (perhaps
> with the right options on invocation).
>
> You could call them and ask them, they seemed very friendly and
> helpful a couple of years ago when I talked to them.
>
> On 08/13/2024 12:41 PM, Henry Bent wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was working with my IRIX 4 machine recently and noticed a
>> mysterious file - /usr/lib/ecfe.  It turns out that this is the
>> Edison Design Group C (not C++) Front End, included almost certainly
>> by accident with the last release of the Developer Toolkit for IRIX
>> 4.  No other piece of the compiler toolchain references the EDG
>> product in any way and there is no documentation for it whatsoever.
>>
>> The research that I did seems to indicate that this is a source to
>> source translator, akin to the contemporary Kuck & Associates product
>> - is that correct?  I also found a reference to EDG's tool being used
>> in the Apogee C compiler. I have a copy of Apogee C for SunOS and it
>> does appear that "cfe" is the same EDG product.  Unfortunately there
>> is no documentation specific to the C front end, and I don't have a
>> license for Apogee C so I can't run the compiler to see how it's
>> calling cfe.  Just running a C file "blah.c" through the IRIX front
>> end with no switches results in a transformed file "blah.int.c".
>> Unfortunately running anything even moderately complex through the
>> front end results in code that either doesn't compile or doesn't run,
>> so I feel that I must be missing some flags or basic options.
>>
>> Does anyone have any information about SGI's use of this software, or
>> any documentation/information in general about the EDG product?  My
>> usual sources came up empty.
>>
>> -Henry
>