A move away from CLN?

[Duraid Madina]

> Err, I just gave the German distributor a call and this is what they
> claimed:  KAI is a frontend-only compiler, it uses GCC or another
> C-compiler as backend.   (?)

Are you sure they're not talking about another KAI product, "Visual KAP".
This is a preprocessor which automatically parallizes source code (and also
performs some source-level optimizations even for serial codes) before
passing it along to another compiler. It's not really a 'compiler' in and of
itself, though. You'd require another compiler as a backend. (That product
is about to be discontinued, by the way.)

What seems to be happening (and is good news) is that the Intel compiler is
slowly transforming from a "rebadged" EPC compiler (with Intel-tweaked)
back-end to a KAI/EPC hybrid (with what appears to be a new back-end for
IA64 (that or they did a LOT of work on an existing one) - the reason I
spoke about "GCC front-end" is that the Intel compiler is doing a pretty
decent job as a chameleon - on Windows, it acts just like Microsoft's Visual
C++ and on Linux, it makes a pretty decent stab at acting like GCC. It's not
enough to let you build a kernel, but it's pretty good!

	Duraid