[gambit-list] scheme on llvm

Arnaud Bergeron abergeron at gmail.com
Sun Feb 15 17:23:00 EST 2009


2009/2/15 Arnaud Bergeron <abergeron at gmail.com>:
> 2009/2/15 Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca>:
>>
>> On 15-Feb-09, at 12:47 AM, lowly coder wrote:
>>
>>> this is kinda off topic, -- but people here seem really smart, so I'll
>>> risk the occasional flames for good criticism + insight
>>>
>>> i think the llvm/jvm projects are really cool, since so much work is put
>>> into jitting; and for one reason or another, I like llvm more than jvm
>>>
>>> i'm curious about the possiblity of a high performance scheme (and perhaps
>>> gambit in particular) running on llvm; where the 'initial implementation'
>>> may not be all that fast ... but letting llvm jit it away
>>>
>>> how does this sound? feasible for a scheme (but not gambit)? down the
>>> pipes planned for gambit? or totally stupid/crazy?
>>>
>>> the 'main' advantage of this approach is that I _assume_ that the llvm
>>> guys are pretty good at hacking up interpreters / jit's ... so why not
>>> benefit from their constant progress :-D
>>
>> I had a group of students implement a LLVM backend for Gambit in one of the
>> courses I teach (compilers).  I'm CCing them.  Perhaps they can give you
>> more information and add their code to the dumping grounds.  I also had a
>> student write a Scheme to CLR compiler which can bootstrap itself.
>>
>> Marc
>
> We did a partial back-end for Gambit using LLVM and were just a little
> bit faster for the benchmarks I tried.  Although, in all cases the
> speed difference could well be credited to some part not being
> implemented properly and thus requiring less work.

I forgot to mention, but what we did was using LLVM 2.3.  2.5 is about
to be released now and has a lot of improvements over 2.3.

> I have some plans to take the implementation in another direction, to
> ease the expression of the various gambit back-end statements.  I have
> not done any work on this yet.  As for the code we did, it is
> incomplete, but I have no objection to it being posted on the dumping
> grounds, but I have no place to host it.  I can send you the code if
> you are interested.
>
> Also, the back-end we did was only for static compiling.  Although
> once I get back in it and maybe get it to work solidly, it could be
> used for gsi too.  Don't hold your breath for now though.
>
> Arnaud
>



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