Smoking toooooo much PHP

Sterlings got another nice little blog up about parrot & .NET, he touches a bit on my concerns (less directly), in that with a fixed specification, like .NET, making allowances for the oddities of Scripting languages is going to be a little more complex...

All this talk has been making me ponder the real reason for my interest in them. At the heart I guess is the desire to do desktop programming again, and seeing the results of PHP-GTK. While proving to be a great development enviroment, and lighting fast on linux, it proved to be less than desirable on Win32 desktops.. Really slow on old machines (basically everything is slow on them.. including Java, and .Net wont even install on alot of those win95/98 boxes...), let alone the amount of work I got into with writing bytecode compilers and installers.. - It's a long way from point and click build... deliver..

So I did rack my brain about the whole idea of bytecode languages, and started to ponder... why not compile the thing down to assember and make .exe's and forget about the interpreter/jvm crap....

gcc is an interesting project in that respect - It was designed to have pluginable frontends .. gjc, g++ are just 2 examples, mercury which has backends that compile to .NET, java, and native using gcc shows the potential.. However... most of the documentation for compiler backends indicates the best, first step is to build gcc... - which proved to be impossible .. I just kept ending up with this.. and no great response from google for ideas..
/usr/src/gcc-3.3/gcc/tree.h:351:24: tree-check.h: No such file or directory
print-rtl1.c: In function `print_mem_expr':
print-rtl1.c:93: warning: implicit declaration of function `IDENTIFIER_NODE_CHECK'
print-rtl1.c:93: error: invalid type argument of `->'
print-rtl1.c:102: warning: function `IDENTIFIER_NODE_CHECK' was previously declared within a block
print-rtl1.c:102: error: invalid type argument of `->



oh well, so much for the idea of playing with the toy compiler..., writing php bindings for gcc, then targeting a gcc tree as a target for my parser....