Re: speed versus C

[Alain Frisch <frisch@clipper.ens.fr>]

On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, William Chesters wrote:
>    My point was simply that nearly every* feature of ocaml, however
> abstract in appearance, compiles directly, and compositionally, onto
> an idiom which one might well use in C or even assembler---give or
> take some amount of sugar.  Looking at this fact one way round, I
<snip>
>    * apart from GC and the ocaml classes (of which I must admit I am
> slightly suspicious, because of the significant overhead in a method
> call---you don't really want to use them in an inner loop)

I would also add boxing/unboxing, and structural comparison to the list of
important features which aren't well implemented in classical
architecture.

Do you think it would be easy to design processors with built-in support
for boxed values, GC tags, OO, etc ... that is, a concrete OCaml machine ?

--
Alain Frisch