Hello all,
I've been investigating the possibility of creating a MACHINE
DESCRIPTION (aka BACK-END) for GCC to target PARROT. My thinking is
this: If a satisfactory GCC back-end targeting PARROT is created -and-
PARROT is efficient enough (which from reading the documentation thus
far produced seems like it is an inevitable conclusion) then GCC could
compile itself to PARROT byte-code giving PARROT (and the whole open
source community) a PARROT self-host compiler which compiles multiple
languages (C#, C++, C, Pascal, Objective-C, Java, etc, etc, etc) to the
PARROT runtime.
Is a complete non-starter, or is this something which has
possibilities? Please give your expert opinions.
On Sat, 2004-03-20 at 11:18, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 12:44 PM -0800 3/19/04, Larry Wall wrote:
> >On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 08:57:28AM +0100, Leopold Toetsch wrote:
> >: What's the usage of Continuations from HLLs point of view? Can we get
> >: some hints, what is intended?
> >
> >From the standpoint of Perl 6, I hope to hide continuations far, far
> >away in a galaxy long ago. No wait, wrong movie...
>
> Which is swell, but Perl 6 is only one of the languages we care
> about. Ruby does, and while it's not exactly one of the primary
> targets, scheme and lisp are heavily laced with them.
>
> >We can certainly make it the default that a routine is not going to
> >do anything fancy with continuations unless it is explicitly declared
> >to allow it.
>
> Can't do that. There's no way you can ever really know that, since
> any function or method you call might take one. Forbidding it is
> going to be problematic as well, since then we hit performance issues
> in guaranteeing that.
