Re: [Caml-list] Compiling Ocaml sources to c sources

[Eray Ozkural <examachine@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Jon Harrop <
jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com> wrote:

> >   * Hacking a C generator inside Ocaml is non-trivial, because of the
> >     garbage collector, currified function calls, and tail recursion
> >     etc.
>
> BTW, I was always surprised nobody had converted the bytecode interpreter
> into a via-C compiler by unwinding the C code the interpreter goes through
> to execute a specific OCaml bytecode program. You could even use this with
> something like Clang to get JIT compilation to native code. Not very
> efficient but surely much faster than interpreted bytecode...
>

Hmm, this would only optimize the bytecode fetch/decode step of the ocaml
execution cycle. I am not sure that it will result in much real-world
speedup.

In fact, that seems to be the main problem with many of these so-called JIT
interpreters, which in my opinion, do not seem to have learnt from the HAL
architectures of IBM OS's etc. Was probably also the problem with Transmeta;
cheap compilation entails cheap performance.

Best,

-- 
Eray Ozkural, PhD candidate.  Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ai-philosophy
http://myspace.com/arizanesil http://myspace.com/malfunct

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