Hi Noah, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lav...@gmail.com> writes:
> After watching the discussion of native code generation on this list a > few weeks ago, I decided I'd like to help. I looked at several > possibilities, but it seemed like the easiest and most sure way of > making *something* work was writing bindings to GNU Lightning. Excellent! Have you looked at, ahem, guile-lightning? :-) http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/guile/guile-lightning/?root=guile As you can see it’s an old attempt to do this. I haven’t looked in detail, but there may be ideas or code to borrow. > My thought was to do enough of the Lightning API that it could call C > functions, and then implement a compiler from Guile VM code to native > Lightning-generated code that just called a series of VM functions. > There wouldn't be any inlining or cool things like that, but it would > be a start. You could then add inlining support for individual VM > functions as it seemed important. I had a vague plan to implement JIT in the VM using lightning in C: http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guile/jit.html The (presumed) advantage is that opcodes from vm-*.c could be largely reused. The obvious disadvantage is that it would be C. Writing lightning assembly can be tedious, but probably less so if done in Scheme. > - First, would you like Lightning bindings? Yes! :-) > - Second, what would a good interface to a native code generation > system be? (I'm assuming we'll want Lightning available as a regular > module in addition to using it to speed up the language.) My current > prototype just mimics the Lightning API, but it's not necessarily the > best way to do this. Is there a better way? Something close to lightning at the lowest level probably makes sense. Then there could be a higher-level interface like <http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/guile/guile-lightning/compiler.scm?revision=1.3&root=guile&view=markup> or close to the VM’s own assembly. Looking at <http://github.com/noahl/guile-lightning/blob/master/binds.scm> it seems that you plan to have one subr for each lightning instruction. That would make the cost of assembling a single instruction quite high, compared to that of the raw lightning C macros. Thanks, Ludo’.
