[MLton] MLton: A few questions

[Ville Laurikari]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 03:58:32PM -0600, Matthew Fluet wrote:
>> 2) Is it possible (or sensible) to use a non gcc compiler (e.g. xlc on AIX)?
>
> It might be.  I think that some of the Intel folks have used the Intel
> compiler, but I'm not sure.

Ah, yes, the Intel compiler is highly compatible with GCC, so it might
just work as a drop-in replacement for GCC.

The MLton runtime has some GCC specific code; the most obvious part
is the 200 or so occurrences of __attribute__, but there may be
something else as well.  It could be a fair amount of work, so I'm
interested: what do you think you stand to gain from compiling with
xlc instead of GCC?

An easier way is to leave the runtime alone and only use the -cc flag
for MLton.  If you go this route, make sure you link also with the GCC
runtime library because a runtime built with GCC will depend on it,
but xlc won't supply it automatically.  So you'd probably have to put
in a
   -link-flag "-l `gcc --print-file-name libgcc.a`"
as well.

Emil, I'm also keen to hear if you got MLton compiled OK on AIX?

--
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