Re: [Caml-list] ocamlc compiles hello world, ocamlopt not

[Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>]

On Jan 16, 2013, at 10:48 , Basile Starynkevitch <basile@starynkevitch.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 10:01:06AM +0100, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
>> Am 16.01.2013 09:56:55 schrieb(en) Francois Berenger:
>>> On 01/16/2013 05:02 PM, r0ller@freemail.hu wrote:
>>>> Hi All,
>>>> 
>>>> By the way, is there any doc available about porting ocaml
>>>> (google didn't find any) or any hint on how to move forward? I'd
>>>> really like to have the native compiler on minix too.
>>> 
>>> I think in the past it was possible to generate C code from OCaml
>>> code.
>> 
>> There is no real C backend (and has never been). The only thing you
>> can do is to embed bytecode in a C-friendly way (what -output-obj
>> does). But it is still bytecode.
> 
> Benoit Vaugon & Michel Mauny worked recently on OcamlCC
> (a translator from Ocaml bytecode to C)
> http://oud.ocaml.org/2012/abstracts/oud2012-final10.pdf
> https://github.com/ocaml-bytes/ocamlcc

Very interesting work. I somehow missed that so far. I did something similar prior to starting with OCamlJIT2, but that turned out to be very slow with the compilation of the C code. I'd be interested to hear about results from generating LLVM code instead of C. Actually I'm still thinking that a tracing JIT using LLVM to optimize/generate code could be a viable option for the bytecode runtime (this is one of the results we gathered while working on Colin's thesis, the LLVM backend for the native code compiler).

greets,
Benedikt