Yesterday we reported that the GCC Rust frontend “gccrs” was merged into the GNU Compiler Collections code base for GCC 13. According to foreign media Phoronix, the GCC Modula-2 language front-end code has also been merged.

Modula-2 is one of the languages ​​developed by Niklaus Wirth, the father of the Pascal language, in the 1980s. As a procedural programming language, Modula-2 inherits Niklaus Wirth’s early work on the Modula language and the most famous Pascal, and then Modula-2 Inherited by Modula-3 and Oberon languages. But the Modula-2 language has not been abandoned, and has been used by Lilith workstations, Russian GLONASS navigation satellites, and various aging embedded systems. Over the years, enthusiastic Modula-2 developers have worked hard to incorporate the Modula-2 language front end into GCC.

In early December, the v3 patch series for the GCC Modula-2 frontend was merged, leaving only some code tidying and documentation work. GNU Modula-2 implements the PIM2, PIM3, PIM4, and ISO dialects of Modula-2, and the compiler code has been tested on x86_64 and AArch64. Subsequently, the Modula-2 front end was officially approved to be merged into GCC. This forty-year-old language has finally been merged into GCC’s Git master, which can be found in the GCC 13 compiler version that will be released around March next year. .

Adding the Modula-2 front end to the GCC code base added 541k lines of code, including compiler support, testing, and related infrastructure. GCC now has language front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, D, Rust, and now Modula-2.