On 2011-01-22, at 5:13 PM, Bradley Lucier wrote:
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.
There are no plans to make the C back-end a second-class citizen! The C back-end has great value for its portability. The Gambit compiler will include the C back-end and native back-ends simultaneously, so that it is easy to switch between them. The compiler will certainly be distributed as C files (produced by the C back-end) so that Gambit can be built on any platform and will behave consistently on all platforms.
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.
The fact is that some important performance issues are related to the C back-end. Resolving these issues can't be done by modifying the front-end. Of course improvements to the front-end will benefit all variants of Gambit (C and native back-ends).
Marc