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

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

On Dec 3, 2010, at 14:34 , Till Varoquaux wrote:

> Thanks for the summary.
> 
> You seem to think LLVM wouldn't actually buy us much in term of
> optimisations. In my experience the current ocaml compiler is really
> good when writing code fairly low level but discourages use of
> combinator library, higher order functions, functors in performance
> sensitive code (i.e. you have to do inlining, specialization, constant
> propaagation etc... by hand).
> 
> I was under the impression that some of LLVM passes could be a good
> match for those problems. That is: micro benchmark code that is
> written carefully with those constraints in mind wouldn't gain much
> but some form of "origami" programming could be unfolded by the
> compiler. Am I missing something obvious? (e.g. need for better side
> effect analysis).

This would be possible, yes.

And the usual special note: No, it doesn't work with floating point stuff (automagically).

> Cheers,
> Till

Benedikt