On 8-Dec-07, at 1:05 PM, Bradley Lucier wrote:
> I believe the answer is roughly as follows.
>
> There were various versions of Gambit that generated 68020 code for
> early macintoshes and BBN Butterfly computers, for example; the
> version that is now "Gambit" started as the version that generated
> "C" code, hence "Gambit-C".
>
> Brad
That's the closest to the real answer.
Gambit (without the C suffix) is the generic name of the system which
spans all possible target platforms. Up to now only two target
platforms have been supported: initially Gambit had a back-end
generating Motorola 68020 code (Sun workstation, Apple Macintosh, BBN
butterfly multiprocessor, etc), then around 1994 a back-end generating
C code was introduced. When the C back-end was released I decided to
distinguish the systems with a suffix, so Gambit-68K was the first
system and Gambit-C is the one generating C code. Note that at that
point both front ends were identical, but the front-end of Gambit-C
has evolved to support the C FFI and other extensions. I haven't
worked on Gambit-68K in a long time, because my focus has shifted to
portability rather than raw performance. Portability is the primary
concern, followed by featurefullness, followed by performance. I
think that's what most users want. Gambit-C is very portable, it
works on any system with a decent C compiler (all the major
workstations are covered of course, but Gambit-C has also been used on
unusual target platforms such as the embedded PowerPC processor in
Xilinx FPGAs and the ARM processor on the Nintendo DS). Gambit-C's
abstraction of the target platform allows using it as a virtual
machine (so that the same program will work on Unix, MacOS, Windows,
and other systems with no modifications). Sorry, I'm rambling...
Marc