Re: a plan for native compilation

[Ludovic Courtès]

Howdy!

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:

> So, my thought is to extend procedures with an additional pointer, a
> pointer to a "native" code structure.

(So your point is what should we do now to allow for such experiments
eventually, right?)

Adding an extra work to programs seems like a good idea, yes.

> Now, what technology to choose for the compiler itself? Dunno. For a
> JIT, it would be useful to use something portable, and perhaps do the
> JIT compilation on the bytecode itself, without more source information.
> It would not produce the fastest code, but it would run fast.

Yes, that’s what I had in mind, using GNU lightning (see
<http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/jit.html>.)  It /seems/ to
be doable, with milestones to do it incrementally, starting from a dumb
version.

> I think we can produce better native code ahead-of-time coming from the
> tree-il layer directly. I feel like eventually we'll need to replace
> GLIL with something else, but I don't really know; we'll find out in the
> future I guess. But I do want to do ahead-of-time compilation, because
> I want Guile programs to start up very quickly and not consume much
> memory.

Sure.

lightning does x86, x86_64, sparc, and powerpc (PLT uses it) while Sassy
does only x86, so it may be that both could play a role.

Anyway, not for now.  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.