Re: TenDRA

Roger@natron.demon.co.uk (Roger Barnett) writes:


> When we discussed with the DRA their licencing terms for using the
> ANDF technology in our compilers, the charges they proposed were
> breathtaking. This would have been 4 or 5 years ago.


As far as I understand it, the technology failed to sell particularly
well, and there was no further funding within DRA to support it.


In the hope of encouraging the take up of it, TenDRA was released to
the world under a BSD-like license. (I've just had a look at the
license, and (although IANAL) it looks pretty liberal: if you wanted
to use it today in commercial compilers, I think you could.)


The code looks relatively clean; it has a bunch of tools which may
well be neat (for generating parsers from grammars and so on)---I just
don't know enough to judge.


As other people have commented, what it really lacks is a C++ library.
It's allegedly possible to use GNU iostreams with hacking, and I
presume SGI's STL could then be used, but I couldn't get it to work.


The i386 generated code is apparently not particularly good. There's
a paper describing a TDF "installer" based on the gcc backend; it's a
shame things like that weren't released with the rest of TenDRA.


The "producers" and API descriptions strike me as potentially valuable
as the basis for souped-up lints; the C++ one is of limited value
without the standard library, of course.

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