Re: guile-vm 0.3

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> I can't really speak for the VM, but what I would like to see is
> some investigation of existing `butch' Scheme or Lisp compilers.  In
> what way could they be used with Guile?  For example, can Stalin be
> modified to compile modules in a non-closed world, emitting the
> simple mid-level language for the compiler in guile-lightning?

This is a good point.  I've been playing with hobbit, but I can't say
I understand it to any notable extent.  I haven't really looked at
what it's doing internally.

I could also ask Siskind for his opinion.  I've spoken with him off an
on over the past couple of years about various things, including the
possibility of using Stalin in parallel with other languages in a very
"hacked" setup just to gain performance.  I'll try and send him a
message shortly and see if he has any thoughts.

> I kinda like the dual approach: a VM is useful even when we have a
> native compiler (for debugging and compactness), and when we fuse
> the two on such a low level, there should be little problem with
> maintaining them.

This sounds pretty good, though I wonder if applying lightning after
moving to the byte code stage might mean losing information that would
allow jit optimizations that wouldn't make sense for the VM.
i.e. does the original source contain information that would suggest
one kind of optimization for byte-codes and another for JIT.  I'm not
sure this is a serious concern, though...

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930