Re: ocamlopt LLVM support (Was: [Caml-list] OCamlJIT2 vs. OCamlJIT)

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Dec 5, 2010, at 17:57 , Török Edwin wrote:

> On Sun, 5 Dec 2010 17:37:32 +0100
> Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Two main areas for now: The GC interface and the exception handling.
>> LLVM's exception support is really limited; the GC support is better
>> and more generic. I don't know how to implement the OCaml exception
>> model within LLVM w/o adding a lot of special case stuff to LLVM
>> itself (mentioned in my original post); if there would be a way to
>> easily extend LLVM with special exception models, other projects
>> could plug in their models.
> 
> There is a discussion on the LLVM mailing list about changing exception
> handling in LLVM:
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2010-December/036692.html
> 
> If the new model is not generic enough to support OCaml's model, then I
> think now would be a good time to describe on the LLVM ML what OCaml's
> model would need and the proposal doesn't cover.

It's not a different model, but a better implementation of what is already available. From what I've seen now, the best starting point seems to be the setjmp/longjmp model, which is supported by LLVM. It's certainly slower than the current scheme, but well, it would be a starting point.

> Best regards,
> --Edwin

Benedikt