RE: ocamlopt LLVM support (Was: [Caml-list] OCamlJIT2 vs. OCamlJIT)

[Jon Harrop <jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com>]

Till wrote:
> You seem to think LLVM wouldn't actually buy us much in term of
> optimisations. In my experience the current ocaml compiler is really
> good when writing code fairly low level but discourages use of
> combinator library, higher order functions, functors in performance
> sensitive code (i.e. you have to do inlining, specialization, constant
> propaagation etc... by hand).
> 
> I was under the impression that some of LLVM passes could be a good
> match for those problems. That is: micro benchmark code that is
> written carefully with those constraints in mind wouldn't gain much
> but some form of "origami" programming could be unfolded by the
> compiler. Am I missing something obvious? (e.g. need for better side
> effect analysis).

I doubt many of LLVM's optimization passes would kick in if the type information has been removed by boxing and casting all the pointers to i8*.

Cheers,
Jon.