Re: C as assembly language

Fergus Henderson wrote
>>3) Tail-recursion is hard in C. Even GCC can't do it in the
>> general case. Possible solutions: a driver-loop (or "trampoline")
>> as used in Steele's Rabbit, in Gambit or sml2c, or Continuation Passing
>> Style.
>
>The trouble with the driver loop approach is that you can't pass
>arguments in registers anymore (unless you use global register
>variables -- and see below for the problems with that), and you have
>to use your own call stack, rather than the C call stack. This also
>makes interoperability more difficult.


There is an article by Eliot Miranda floating around in the
comp.compilers archives somewhere, where he uses some interesting
postprocessing on GCC's assembly output, applied to threaded code.


>The trouble with continuation passing style is that C compilers don't
>do general tail call optimization (indeed, doing so in C is tricky,
>because the program might take the address of local variables). So a
>straightforward CPS will suffer from stack leaks. There are
>approaches to avoid this, but they do have their drawbacks.


Which would that be?


cheers,
felix

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