Re: backend question

thp@cs.ucr.edu
17 Nov 2002 23:20:16 -0500

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From: thp@cs.ucr.edu
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 17 Nov 2002 23:20:16 -0500
Organization: University of California, Riverside
References: 02-11-063 02-11-078
Keywords: translator
Posted-Date: 17 Nov 2002 23:20:16 EST

Joachim Durchholz <joachim_d@gmx.de> wrote:
+ John wrote:
+ > [These days the most popular intermediate format is C. -John]
+
+ Which doesn't mean it's particularly suitable... C gets you started
+ quickly, but for an intermediate format, it abstracts away the wrong
+ things in some places. This begins to bite if you're doing
+ concurrency, exceptions, fancy integer arithmetic, tail-call
+ elimination, or state machines.


Standard C lacks an indirect jump (though one can be kludged a switch
statement). Anything that can be done in say MIPS assembly language
can be done in gcc, which has an indirect goto. Where necessary, one
can generates comments that preserve the memory of what got abstracted
away.


Tom Payne
[I didn't say that C was an ideal intermediate language, I said it was
popular. It does seem to have adequate performance for a lot of
translation applications. -John]


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