On Nov 30, 2010, at 9:01 AM, bluestorm wrote:

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com> wrote:
There would be several advantages in switching to LLVM for code generation. The general idea is that if other people work on the low-level stuff, it is less work for the OCaml implementors.

[...]

LLVM is nice and trendy

Yes, and it has to stop. I don't understand why there is so much hype around LLVM. Why would you think something written in C++ would be far better than the ocaml code we have in the ocamlopt compiler ?


(though it's a shame the GNU guys, partly due to their own mistakes, are losing an important part of the FLOSS ecosystem to Apple...), but I'm personally more interested in the more theoretical projects of  verified compilation toolchains, such as compcert ( http://compcert.inria.fr/ ). It's unrealistic to hope to have a completely verified ocaml-to-assembly compiler, as we would first need formal semantics for the OCaml language itself, but it is the very point : doing that kind of things forces you to have formal semantics, which is very interesting in many respects.

Asking for a decent compiler was once the way to tell apart the serious languages from the insane string-fiddling script languages, but the line is blurred by the indecent amount of work injected in the optimization of those insane languages. Formal semantics will distinguish the gentlemen of the future.
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