Re: [Caml-list] ocaml doesn't need to optimize on amd64??

[Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu>]

> > Yeah, but my area of interest is really embedded realtime stuff, running
> > typically on architectures which are quite resource constrained. On some
> > of those your typical GC wouldn't even fit in the code memory. And I'm
> > not even (most of the time) using dynamic memory allocations. None of my
> > code really calls for any sort of boxing -- there's no need for it. All I
> > need is C that is more expressive and easier to optimize. No run-time
> > variants, really, all types are known and fixed, and data is at fixed
> > locations in memory, or on the stack, or occasionally on the heap which
> > is manually managed (C-like).
> >
> > Of course that pertains to the code that gets generated, because I should
> > be able to use abstract concepts while writing the code. If I pass a
> > function to a function, it doesn't necessarily mean that the compiler
> > must emit the code for the former, and that the latter should actually
> > call (as call machine instruction) the former.
>
> This may be something you have seen before and dismissed, and it's not
> really OCaml at all, but have you looked at PreScheme?  It's a scheme
> dialect (and, in fact, runs *un-modified* in a scheme interpreter),
> plus a compiler that turns it into optimized C of the type you're
> talking about.  (For example, one optimization is that all
> higher-order procedures are beta-substituted away at compile time.)
> It might not really fit your needs, but perhaps there's some ideas you
> could steal there, in any case.  (The scheme48 guys used it to write
> the VM for scheme48, which sounds to my un-expert ears like it would
> have a lot in common with the tasks you're looking at doing.)

If it turned it into C-- it'd be even better, because I can't count much on C 
compilers for my platforms either: Zilog Z8 compiler and assembler/linker has 
bugs which produce wrong code, and for SX28 there's, afaik, only one C 
compiler that isn't quite there yet anyway.

C-- would be easier to generate code from.

Right now my hackish platform runs in LISP, so Scheme wouldn't be so much 
different, but I don't really know how macros are done in Scheme, and I kind 
of depend on them.

Cheers, Kuba