Edison Design Group, due to the cessation of its activities opened the source code of the frontend compiler EDG C/C++ and transferred its development to the community. Further work on EDG C/C++ will be carried out under the auspices of the non-profit organization C++ Alliance, which provides infrastructure and funds work on projects such as Boost. EDG C/C++ code is open source under the Apache 2.0 license with LLVM exceptions that remove restrictions on including runtime parts of the compiler in binaries and solve compatibility problems with GPLv2.
Edison Design Group was founded in 1988 and specializedin developing frontends for the C and C++ languages, performing work on preprocessing, lexical, syntactic and semantic analysis of source code, identifying errors and converting into a universal intermediate representation, which is then used by the backend to generate machine code. EDG C/C++ has been used as a front-end in many proprietary compilers and code analyzers, including products such as Intel C++ Compiler, Comeau C++, Microsoft Visual C++, NVIDIA CUDA Compiler, SGI MIPSpro and Portland C/C++.
In addition to converting source code into an intermediate representation
EDG C/C++ provides capabilities for diagnosing errors in code with the generation of detailed information about problems and their location in the code. In this case, the front end does not perform optimization and only generates a high-level tree-like structured representation in a universal intermediate language, reflecting information about declarations, operators and expressions with bindings to the source code to simplify the generation of debugging information.
EDG C/C++ fully supports the C++11, C++14 and C++17 standards, partially C++20 and C++23, as well as Microsoft extensions and dialects, GNU and Clang. One of the main activities after the project is transferred to the community will be to work on adding full support for current C++ standards to the EDG. In the long term, it is planned to bring EDG C/C++ to the state of a full-featured compiler capable of competing with GCC and LLVM/Clang.
At the first stage, engineers from EDG will be involved in maintaining the code base of the new open project, whose work will be funded by the C++ Alliance. Over time, open processes will be developed to allow third parties to actively participate in development while maintaining high quality of the product. The committee that will oversee the development of the project will be headed by John Spicer, one of the key developers of EDG C/C++.