[gambit-list] compiling fib

Bradley Lucier lucier at math.purdue.edu
Sat Jan 22 17:13:29 EST 2011


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




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