Re: Update and Questions

[Nala Ginrut <nalaginrut@gmail.com>]

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So it'd be the preform of something kind of Guile's AOT compiler which
we(all guilers)  had talked about few months ago?
I think it's a great idea!  And I'm glad to see your work.

PS:  I agree with "Stallman". ;-)

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello Guile developers,
>
> Despite the long gap since my last email, I have in fact been working
> on the compiler project. This email has two purposes: first, to make
> sure that I have a basically reasonable design before I work more, and
> second, to ask a logistical question.
>
> First of all, I very much appreciated your suggestions of things to
> read. I did look at the Reasoned Schemer. I also spent quite a while
> studying Stalin (the compiler), because I believe that is the current
> fastest Scheme compiler. (And therefore, it's the one I'd like to beat
> with our compiler.) The design I am currently working with is the same
> as Stalin's design.
>
> It is a propagation network. Basically you have a graph of Tree-IL
> nodes, where each Tree-IL node is connected to its parent, its
> children, and optionally other nodes (a variable is connected to the
> place it was declared. A primitive function is connected to the error
> continuation it could jump to). The compiler propagates information
> along the edges of this graph, attempting to find the minimum set of
> possible values for each variable and each jump target. It also
> performs partial evaluation as a special case of this.
>
> What I have described also seems to be how Hindley-Milner type
> inference works (although I think we can do a bit better than standard
> Hindley-Milner systems). Does this seem like a good design for the
> static analyzer portion?
>
> One big oversight that I know of is that this doesn't do any sort of
> specialization. I think that is an extremely important feature, but
> when I looked at doing specialization I thought that it would use all
> of the logic this would, but require a bit more work to keep the
> complexity down, so I thought I should do this first.
>
> I haven't thought much about the rest of the compiler yet, but I
> imagine you can basically walk this graph and try to choose
> representations for each piece of it using the information you
> gathered in the analysis phase. The key ingredient for that will be a
> library of representations for each Tree-IL node.
>
> The second part of this post is a logistical question. I would like to
> do this work in public, so other people can see it (and hopefully
> contribute). Where is the best place to do this? Should I make a
> branch on Savannah? That makes the most sense to me, but it seems a
> bit unnatural, since this project is very separate from the rest of
> Guile.
>
> And finally, a fun thing. The current best Scheme compiler (that I
> know of) is called Stalin. Therefore, I suggest that our compiler be
> called "Stallman", after our fearless leader (whose name also starts
> with "s"). :-)
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Noah
>
>

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