[MLton] C-- backend

[John Dias]

Well, to be more precise, qc-- supports multiple stacks, but it does not 
yet detect overflow.
-j

On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Matthew Fluet wrote:

>
>> I was recently told that a C-- backend for MLton exists, but the newest
>> information I could find was from March of 2005.
>
> That is the most recent info in the mailing list.  I made a couple more 
> modifications to the backend in Summer 2005, when one of Norman Ramsey's 
> summer undergrad students was thinking about more efficient representations 
> of span data.
>
>> Targetting C-- would be pretty handy for us, because some of the 
>> optimizations involve weak continuations.  However, the last thing I read 
>> on the backend said that it still hasn't implemented callcc (among other 
>> features), so that might make things more difficult.
>
> Correct; the qc-- compiler doesn't currently support multiple stacks. Since, 
> to use C-- effectively, we aren't using the same trampoline as is used in the 
> C backend, there needs to be a C-- stack for every ML stack.
>
> A grad student was working on getting C-- and qc-- to support multiple 
> stacks, but I don't believe that they have been fully integrated yet.  And 
> they certainly haven't been pushed into the C-- backend.
>
>> I wanted to know what the current state of the C-- backend is, and if/where 
>> we could get the source code.
>
> The state is pretty much what was documented in the March 2005 emails. 
> (Modulo some bugs fixed in the qc-- compiler.)  It is still very 
> experimental, but you're welcome to check it out.  It is available in SVN at:
>  svn://mlton.org/svnroot/mlton/branches/on-20050420-cmm-branch
>
> IIRC, in order to compile with qc-- using the C-- backend, you'll need to 
> copy the lib/qc-- files from the qc-- install directory to build/lib/self in 
> the mlton build.
>
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