Re: backend question

Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>
> You can work around a lot of limitations of C - it's going to be ugly
> and inefficient, but it's possible. Tail-call elimination is not
> feasible (unless gcc offers another extension to handle exactly this,
> of course *g*).


Tail-call elimination is no problem in C (or even Standard C). There
are several ways of implementing it (as shown by Steele, or Baker).
Wether that's ugly, is in the eye of the beholder. I find
machine-generated C much more appealing than x86 assembly language.
Of course it's less efficient than a direct, native code translation
scheme. But pure, raw efficieny isn't *that* important
anymore...otherwise everybody would still code in Assembler.


Besides, then there is point about the costs of porting a compiler to
new hardware. An important issue, IMHO.


On the other hand several people seem to work towards providing TCO
for GCC (I just read one or two papers, though - I don't know what the
current state of affairs is).


cheers,
felix

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