Re: [Caml-list] OCaml maintenance status / community fork (again)

[Pierre-Alexandre Voye <ontologiae@gmail.com>]

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2011/12/8 Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer@googlemail.com>

>
>
>
> The problem is IMHO that there is no one at INRIA caring about ARM. In an
> open model we would have maintainers for the ARM port(s).
>
Note that if Ocaml compiler would have a C backend, all these problems or
architecture port would disappear...
Ocaml would have more than 30 target[1]
In my Opinion, trying to generate assembler is a bad idea because modern
CPU require a lot of work to generate good assembler.
Only the GCC and LLVM team are big enough to be able to make a good job.

In the Lisaac project, we were able to compete with C[2]. Lisaac is a
compiler for a Smalltalk like language : the if/then/else is unknown to the
compiler, it is defined in the true/false object. So it is a proof that a
very high level language can reach C performance. Ocaml can do this,
because the compiler is able to know a lot of type informations.
The Lisaac compiler use strong flow analysis and, more importantly generate
C code. To reach performance, Lisaac tailor C code to help GCC to generate
very optimized code.
For instance,  GCC is able to produce MMX/SSE/AVX code when you write code
like this :
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/vectorization.html#vectorizab

AutoVectorization is just an example of what you can do with GCC (or LLVM
soon certainly) and which would require a lot of work with an own asm
generator.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#Architectures
[2]
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=lisaac&lang2=gcc


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