Re: guile-vm 0.3

[Keisuke Nishida]

At 12 Apr 2001 11:45:40 -0500,
Rob Browning wrote:
> 
> > 2) you do explicitly say that this IL is Scheme-oriented.  what would
> >    be the minimal set of additions to make it suitable as a target for
> >    an Elisp compiler?  for CL?  for Python?
> 
> IMO, this would be *very* nice, and perhaps having a language neutral
> IL is more likely to succeed than other-language->guile front ends.
> 
> I think it would be wonderful if we ended up with a really good hybrid
> IL -> byte-code/jit-machine code compiler that could host a variety of
> languages.  Sounds like a tall order, though :>

And this is my plan, as I said before.  I want to execute at least
Scheme and ML on my VM.  I'm getting feelings that I really need a
statically typed language when I implement something like a compiler.

Although translating a target language -> IL -> compiled code looks
like a long path, we don't need a literal translation in practice.
What we really need is a common internal parse tree.  Although
I often write the list representation of GLIL (i.e., "(@asm () ...)"),
no such list is actually produced during compilation.  Therefore,
having an IL does not make additional cost (I guess).