Re: summer of code ideas

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com> writes:

> Yes, it's been a while since we talked about that :-). I still want to
> do it, though. The current status as I see it is that I have a
> prototype JIT that works, and a plausible way to integrate it into
> Guile's VM. What needs to happen now is to write all of the opcodes as
> JIT functions (the prototype had five or so opcodes). Since writing
> them by hand would cause an absurd amount of code duplication, I
> wanted to do it automatically.

Yes.

> We talked about having a Scheme-based language that could compile to
> both plain C and JIT, but decided that would make the VM too
> complicated,

Maybe I forgot to feed that thread, but I think it might be easier to
have a high-level representation the VM opcodes as sexps (possibly a
subset of Scheme), and then write the C files from that.

Though the main difficulty is to find a sufficiently expressive way to
write opcodes in.

> I notice that GCC now has the ability to use plugins,

The plug-in API doesn’t allow plug-ins to add new front-ends
(info "(gccint) Plugins").

Thanks,
Ludo’.