AMD's HSAIL Front-End For GCC Might Finally Be Close For Merging

There is finally an update on the proposed HSAIL front-end for GCC for supporting the BRIG binary form of the Heterogeneous System Architecture Intermediate Language.

See that earlier article for more background information on the ongoing GCC HSA efforts that have been happening for a few years now. That HSAIL GCC front-end has been quiet since it was proposed back in May but now it looks like it may be close to going mainline.

GCC developer and SUSE employee Martin Jambor has reviewed the front-end. He noted that the code quality has improved significantly and assuming the developers have the GCC copyright assignment in place, he will ask the GCC steering committee to approve the intention of landing this functionality. A global review will also still need to go through the code.

Thus it's looking like the HSAIL BRIG front-end might soon be in GCC mainline, but it might not make it for GCC 7. There still are those hoops to jump through and feature development is ending next month for what will become GCC 7.1. Thus unless this work magically gets done quickly or they allow the front-end as a late addition during stage three, this work might end up being postponed until GCC 8 in 2018 for seeing it out in stable form.