Re: Reviving Guile-VM

[Neil Jerram]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> QScheme [1] has apparently been abandoned since 2000, and it looks like
> its VM has never been fully functional.  Guile-VM seems much more mature
> actually.  However, that of STklos is fully functional and it seems to
> be pretty close to Guile-VM (similar instruction set).

Cool, sounds like you're well on top of the field.

> > Hang on, I thought the instructions were byte code ...  How many
> > levels of byte code are there, and how do they differ?
>
>
> Bytecode is just the binary representation of a sequence of
> instructions, no more.
>
> However, the compiler does use _two_ intermediate languages when
> compiling Scheme to VM "assembly":
>
>   Scheme -> GHIL -> GLIL -> assembly
>
> (where GHIL stands for "Guile's High-level Intermediate Language" and
> GLIL stands for "Guile's Low-level Intermediate Language").  The former
> is pretty close to Scheme while the latter is closer to the VM's
> assembly.  I think the goal was to make Guile-VM easily usable for other
> languages as well.  Fun.  ;-)

So where is the "biggest" jump here?  Would it be correct to say 
something like GHIL is a good target for all Lisp-like languages; and 
GLIL is a more general target that allows for more different languages?

Regards,
        Neil