[MLton] C-- backend

[Matthew Fluet]

O.k., but the C-- spec (Section 8.3) doesn't give any specifics on how to 
start a new stack going.

> 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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>
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