MLton space pig

[Matthew Fluet]

> > Something  is  funny  space-wise  in the 2001-03-21 version of MLton.  If you
> > grab the URL
> >     http://sourcelight.com/Z/bloat.tgz
> > you will see a SML program.  The whole thing is only 483 lines worth  of  SML
>
> I observed the same problem as you.  The outputAssembly message means that the
> X86 code generator is starting.  Since the amount of time it takes (on my
> machine) to reach that point is about two seconds and the amount of space is not
> that much, I bet there is a problem in the X86 codegen.  There haven't been any
> changes to the codegen since 2001-03-21, so the bug has probably been around for
> a while.  Matthew is starting here tomorrow (Tuesday), so hopefully he can take
> a look.

I'm looking into it today.  The short fix is to compile with
-native-live-transfer false
That should produce an executable in a reasonable amount of time.  It
also means that the program won't carry any live data in registers across
basic blocks, but that shouldn't be a big performance hit.  I'll see what
I can find out about the real problem.