Wow, yeah, I'm glad I failed to talk him out of it! Still, looking at his list of "big things that need to be done" -- this is not yet a general-purpose C comp

Wow, yeah, I'm glad I failed to talk him out of it! Still, looking at his list of "big things that need to be done" -- this is not yet a general-purpose C compiler. I should have asked what his goals for the project were. If he wants a compiler that handles all of C and produces code good enough that people would actually want to use it -- say, within a factor of 5 of optimized GCC output -- I think it's still clear that that's a huge project. But if he just wants to port hardware drivers, which appears to be his primary purpose, yeah, I can see that that might not be so hard. Driver code tends not to use the whole language, though it can do some weird low-level stuff like pointer type punning that can be hard to model in CL. And performance is probably not critical for most drivers since they do little computation.