Re: [Caml-list] Native compiler for oCaml on System Z

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net>]

On 07/09/2015 10:35 PM, Bull Durham wrote:
> Hello. I'm with the IBM Linux on Z Open Source Ecosystem Center of 
> Competency in Toronto. I would like to provide (and maintain) a port 
> of the OCaml native compiler for Linux on System Z (a.k.a IBM 390 or 
> s390x). Can someone advise me on whom to contact to begin discussions 
> on how to make the port available to the wider OCaml community? 
> Ideally it would be great if it could ultimately become part of the 
> standard OCaml distribution. Thanks for any advice you can give.


A possible way might be to not directly target SystemZ but to leverage 
on some of the efforts which
either have translated the Ocaml bytecode to C, or to consider writing 
some JIT backend for Ocaml;
I'm thinking of patching the Ocaml native compiler to use LLVM or more 
probably the very new
GCCJIT https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/jit to leverage on the 
optimization abilities of GCC middle-end & back-end etc.

There are indeed some issues, in particular compatibility between the 
garbage collector and what such JIT libraries are able to generate (tail 
recursion is less of an issue at least in GCCJIT).

Regards.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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