[avr-gcc-list] Compiling Oberon-2 for AVR

[Stewart Greenhill]

Hi Folks,

I'm looking at the feasibility of porting an Oberon-2 compiler to target
the AVR. Oberon-2 is an object-oriented descendant of Pascal, developed by
Wirth et al. as a sucessor to Modula-2. OOC (ooc.sourceforge.net) is an
optimising Oberon-2 compiler with a back-end that emits ANSI C.

After a little initial work, I managed to get OOC to generate some code
that behaves sensibly on the AVR. Importantly, there don't seem to be any
problems with method calls so I have both object-oriented and procedural
programming models working. Now I have a couple of questions.

First problem is that the run-time type descriptors eat too much RAM on my
target (AT90s8535). These obviously need to be stripped down and placed
into ROM. It looks like progmem/PRG_RDB is the only way to do this.

Are there any limitations on initialisation of static structures in ROM?
Providing the progmem attributes are correct, can I treat it like a regular
initialisation (ie. initialise a pointer in progmem with the address of a
structure in progmem)?

Is there any support on the horizon for multiple address spaces in gcc?

How do I keep up to date with changes in the implementation of avr-gcc? 

Thanks to everyone involved for your great work.

Cheers,
  Stewart