On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 15:08 -0500, Marc Feeley wrote:
On 2011-01-21, at 2:44 PM, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
Any chance of an ARM back end?
ARM would be the logical next back-end to write. But there are no plans for that yet.
Marc:
You have not suggested this, but ...
I would REALLY, REALLY, REALLY not like to see the C back end become some kind of second-class citizen because of all this work. I have not been following closely the development of other Scheme systems, but my impression is that the C back ends of some of them are something of an afterthought.
Also, I would prefer that general improvements be made to the compiler, rather than relying on the (partial) speedup (on some things) that compiling directly to assembler gives. I'm reminded here of the gmp project, which in my opinion always has nearly optimal implementations of any algorithms they might choose (because of their assembly coding of inner loops, etc.), but which has also shown that improving the algorithms they use sometimes gives orders of magnitude improvements in speeds. (It is my opinion that relying on a higher-order language than C and assembler would make it easier to explore different algorithms, but I've explored that choice in Gambit, and gmp now beats Gambit in all bignum operations, in part by implementing some algorithms implemented first in Gambit.)
Brad