Re: RTL has landed!

[Nala Ginrut <nalaginrut@gmail.com>]

On Sat, 2013-11-09 at 14:39 +0100, Andy Wingo wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Just a brief note to say that if you haven't noticed, the "master"
> branch of Guile now compiles to the new virtual machine, using the new
> compiler.  All tests pass.  The old VM is gone!
> 

Congrats!

> There are a couple of regressions that I would like to fix soonish:
> 
>   * The compiler is somewhat slow.  I haven't tried to optimize it at
>     all, so there's lots to do here.  To a degree it is to be expected,
>     as the compiler does more work -- but I hope to get it faster than
>     the 2.0 compiler.
> 
>   * We don't have local variable information.  In the debugger, ,locals
>     doesn't print anything.  Here we need to build this information at
>     compile-time, write it into ELF somehow (perhaps using DWARF), and
>     read it out as needed at runtime.  I'll take a look at this too.
> 
>   * The manual is out of date, as regards the compiler and VM.
> 
> Besides these regressions, there are a many optimizations to make --
> many more than before -- now that we have a better intermediate language
> in which to express them.
> 
> Let the list know if you find any problems that aren't covered by the
> test suite.
> 
> I hope we can get out a 2.1.0 release -- which would be a prerelease for
> 2.2 -- around mid-December or so.  We can aim for 2.2.0 for next May or
> so, but that's a totally fictional date I just made up :)
> 

Next May sounds nice, but no rush anyway IMO ;-)

Thanks for working on it!

> Cheers,
> 
> Andy