Re: What's lacking: a good intermediate form

> Maybe someone has already suggested this to you, but if you are
> looking for an intermediate language, LLVM is worth checking out.
> It will give you back ends for many popular processors.


I have looked at LLVM in quite a bit of detail as interesting as some
of it is as intermediate code is is another member of John's swamp.


The intermediate code Holy Grail always fails to deal with the problem
that optimization in many instruction sets requires code design
decisions to be applied early in the translation that filter through
to the IL and then to the actual machine code generator. Once this
is done the generic optimization becomes a collection of conditional
compiles.


Alternatively, no early changes are made but processor architecture
dictates that some optimizations require processor specific additions.


Most IL's including the ones we have created are designed to be
processor independent. All of them become difficult to maintain as
soon as a significant change in processor architecture needs to be
supported.


Regards,


--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://www.bytecraft.com

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