Re: wip-rtl, solstice edition

[Noah Lavine]

Hello,

The new VM looks great.

> But after those things are done, we still need to bridge the gap between
> Tree-IL and RTL assembly.  We will probably have to scrap GLIL, though I
> can't tell yet.

As I said, I've been working on a compiler from Tree-IL directly to
RTL. So far, I have not found that I really wanted another layer in
between the RTL and the Tree-IL.

It looks to me like the GLIL->assembly compiler spends most of its
effort building constant tables, which I believe the RTL assembler
does in the rtl branch. So GLIL wouldn't be abstracting over much
compared to plain RTL, unless you moved that out of the assembler, or
made the GLIL-equivalent higher level in some way.

> So, that's the status.  Apologies for there being no overview yet; I
> will try to write something about that soon.  I reckon we are about a
> month away from a VM that works well, and has good debugging
> information, and two or three months away from a merge to master
> (meaning, we compile all of Scheme).  At that point we could look to
> release the first 2.2 beta release, aiming at a final 2.2 sometime early
> next year.

This is very exciting! Thanks for working on the new VM.

Noah