[gambit-list] compiling fib

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Mon Jan 24 10:16:16 EST 2011


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




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