[gambit-list] Guidelines to implement a backend?

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Wed Feb 9 09:37:07 EST 2011


On 2011-02-09, at 9:03 AM, Oleg Parashchenko wrote:

> Hello Marc,
> 
> On Tue, 8 Feb 2011 09:53:31 -0500
> Marc Feeley <feeley at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
> ...
>> Do you still want to generate PHP?  Is the choice of PHP important or
>> do you want any portable virtual machine?
> 
> My big plan is to code a library for developers and sell it. Instead of
> using a traditional programming language, I'd like to program in
> a pseudocode (by coincide, it is Scheme R5RS) and generate versions for
> many platforms: c, java, .net etc. And the main platform is conventional
> PHP.
> 
>> PHP is a rather slow VM.
> 
> Yes. But at least I hope that Scheme-to-PHP converted code will be not
> much slower than an equivalent native PHP code.
> 

If performance is important then I would suggest that you test performance manually, i.e. you compile a Scheme program "by hand" to PHP roughly how Gambit-PHP would do it, and check performance against a program directly coded in PHP.  It would be unfortunate if you spent a lot of time developing a PHP back-end for Gambit to discover in the end that the performance is not good enough for your application.  My intuition tells me that the code generated by Gambit-PHP will be at best an order of magnitude slower than pure PHP.

Marc




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